Ling Long
by Albrecht Starkarm
Summary: The elegant tinkle of jade and the tender embrace of hearts and bodies in Shanghai.
1. Shanghai

**Shanghai, People's Republic of China, 2012**

"Well?" My interlocutor seems impatient; he'd be an intimidating presence, draped in black battle armor, if it weren't for the fact that he's a foot beneath my height and afflicted with the most piteously simpering voice in English. It's an extraordinary contrast with his commanding tone as he barks in Shanghainese to his subordinates; he favors the one dour, dull-eyed Party observer with slightly awkward Mandarin when warranted.

"Well, what?" Obviously, he doesn't care for the fact that I soar above him, that I'm a woman, that I'm a foreigner- an American, no less-, and that I'm currently his official superior, however tenuous that is.

"What are your orders, ma'am?"

"Sir." I correct crossly, rising to my complete height from the lumbar-shattering seat that seems to have been designed by a blind, dyslexic sadist. "And I've already told you what your directives are."

"Sit and wait?" He gesticulates irately to the constellation of monochrome displays flickering with a retina-searing severity in the midst of the turbid, tobacco-reeking gloom of the surveillance van.

"Until I hear otherwise from intel. That's right. So, sit down," and shut up, I don't add.

"You are certain that our assistance is required?" The Party man is slightly more polite, but no less aggravated. He stubs out a cigarette that's periodically flared through the sullen darkness upon an ashtray that's a reasonable approximation of the aftermath of Vesuvius and impatiently ignites another. He's been chain-smoking for hours, and I've been sipping as daintily as I can manage at the endless cups of tea that some obsequious lackey is delivering us, wondering myself exactly when the hell I'll receive the go-ahead. I hate Shanghai; the most damn populous city in China is an ideal venue in which to vanish, and that's exactly what she's done... What she had done, I correct myself with a slightly bitter grin, until yesterday, when some Triad thug decided that the reward might be worthwhile.

"She's extremely dangerous." I affirm, finally, following a few seconds. Dangerous, but not lethal; I can't recall a single instance in which she's ever killed anyone. "Non-lethal force only."

"Excuse me?" The midget tactical commander's becoming irritable again.

"Non-lethal force only. I don't mean less-lethal, or shots to the legs; I mean strictly non-lethal measures. They do teach you take-down techniques that don't involve high-explosives and automatic fire, don't they, Chang?" I'm not ordinarily this impolite; sincerely, I'm not. But, I've heard his whining for ten consecutive hours. I hate Shanghai, and I'll be eager to be rid of it: the oppressive, noxious mist of pollution so dense that it would seem possible to clamber along the curtain of smog to the stratosphere; the perpetual, jarring crush of bodies; the unbelievable stench of concentrated humanity.

"Of course, _sir_." The bitterness is obvious; I don't blame him. I wouldn't be appreciative of Chang intruding upon my territory, either, at Gray Section.

"This is _Huangse-Jian_." The bored, uninflected Midwestern accent contrasts oddly with the flawlessly pronounced Mandarin as it crackles through the headset that weighs irritatingly upon my crown. On a certain superficial level, I don't care for how brutally it destroys the fullness of my hair; I'd certainly not wish to be disheveled when I arrest her, the all-consuming stench of stale cigarettes and body odor permeating my uniform notwithstanding.

"This is _Hong_." I reply. "Go ahead."

"Target is confirmed; no activity. We're- the hell," a litany of dull thumps, a vaguely sickening crackle, and a familiar voice that inspires a peculiar jumble of emotions. I suppress the grin that threatens to split my impassive scowl.

"Hey, Princess. How you doin' today? Doin' pretty good myself. You know, you just can't find good help these days, can ya?" I don't bother restraining my smile any longer as the assembled tactical unit gapes; I ignore them for the moment. The familiar image of a sleek, defiant figure, a fall of raven dramatically whorling around her as she adopts a suitably taunting pose, lunges to my mind.

"Just stay there, then. I'll come get you myself."

"Now, now, Red. That's your handle, right? Red?" A teasing snicker, followed by a low and stricken moan from what I assume to be my incapacitated intelligence officer. "I'll be waiting." A hideous, shrill explosion of static, and I toss away the headset, roaring my orders to the transparently befuddled tactical commander.

"Move out, right now! Now! Move it! And no shooting." It's a long-standing superheroine-supervillainness agreement that we don't kill each other. Grazing sweeps of her savage claws, a blistering kiss of that molten plasma that can otherwise bore through steel; even a few bruising, concussion-inducing blows, but nothing that would destroy the flirtatious delight of the pursuit. Still, I'll be glad to be the hell away from this town, even if it involves leading her away, clasped in full-body restraints. Actually, that's an appealing image.

The doors thunder open, and I'm at once engulfed by the oppressive, leeching sultriness of the July evening, my eyes adjusting in an instant to the flickering, seething glower cast by the vast banks of gaudy neon slung along the refuse-strewn avenue. The street manages to bridge the gap between bourgeois merchant quarter and pathetic, benighted slum; at present, as my boot squelches weightily through a drift of what I can only hope is the vestiges of an undigested meal, we're soundly within the slum segment. The locals, finely attuned to the visceral rhythms of the urban wilderness, canyons of glass and steel soaring above stout trunks of decrepit masonry, are scattering at the level thump of steel and the rattle of munitions, vanishing into the roiling murk.

The SWAT unit is in-step with me, faceless, insectine gas masks further heightening their otherworldly presence amid the darkness. I'm clasped in a familiar combat suit, slate-gray, the clinging synthetics a virtually organic presence upon my flesh, elastic and natural; it's remarkably cool, even in the midst of the hostile Chinese summer, though even the stagnant warmth is a blessed relief against my skin by contrast with the malodorous oven of the van. I barrel through the cordon of black-suited security agents crouched in a fashion that would be inconspicuous solely to a blind idiot around a doorless portal, steps resounding through the dilapidated foyer lined with shattered, filth-streaked tile. I glance upward, noticing the ostentatiously severe, emerald flare of her aura vanishing conveniently from above the balcony; I'm hurtling along the unnervingly groaning staircase without any further thought, shouting for the others to secure the exits and diligently clear each floor.

Their presence has merely been a formality, in any event. She's my quarry, and there's a great deal to discuss beyond the probing artificial senses of surveillance. Blood hammers within my temples, my lungs protesting despite a furious training regimen with every stamp of steel-reinforced polymers upon the grimy flights. My gloved palm trails absently across the bannister, slick with a substance that I'd rather not ponder, further propelling me into each lunging pump of my legs, clearing two or three steps at once. My thighs are wracked with a mild tremor, suddenly overcome with the disorienting weightlessness that arises as I finally arrive at the fifth level, the muted and diffuse din of muffled shouts and the crackle of flashbangs rising from the lower floors. At the present rate, I've probably five or six minutes of solitude with her, peering through the hideous gloom generated by a few bare, flickering bulbs that cast bizarre and improbable shadows across the walls.

"Where are you? We don't have the time for this." I mutter under my breath. My instincts guide me to the right, into an obviously disused wing, Chinese graffiti declaiming something assuredly obscene, given the accompanying illustrations. "Where are-" My abortive shout evaporates into the suddenly-still air as the languid, curling splendor of an unmistakable scent caresses my nostrils; Jasmine. A genuinely beatific smile parts my sternly-drawn lips at the moment the rushing stroke of talons rends a savage seam through the dank air beside my cheek; my turn is instantaneous, immediately confronting a snide grin upon full, blackened lips, my intelligence officer's ebon cap perched at a suitably jaunty angle upon a momentous swell of raven locks.

"I'm here, Princess." A thoroughly unnecessary affirmation, followed by a deft, playful series of jabs that sail over my head as I crouch, rising up with a savage blow that she effortlessly absorbs with bewilderingly powerful arms. "What's the matter, Pumpkin? No hug?" My leg lashes out, clashing with her own with what I have no doubt is a sonic boom.

"Why're you here, anyway, Shego?" Her grin broadens into a manic smile of utter rapture as my lips caress that name. "I told you-" any further admonition is interrupted by another stroke of her claws, a seething emerald fire trailing in their wake; it seems as if she's shredding through the very fabric of reality with every attack. "I told you we don't need to do this anymore."

"'Course we do, Baby." Her boot crushes ferociously through the brittle floor at the nadir of a spectacularly graceful flip, ebon tresses further accentuating the elegant arc. A void forms in the floor, and I've a glimpse of the lower level before I vault across it in pursuit. My heart is thundering, every limb flowing into deft, quicksilver motions with the molten tide of adrenaline pulsating through me; the expectation is exquisite- virtually as intensely as the blazing heat in my breast at every swell of her chest as she pants, the sublime fullness of her lips as they envelop each playfully teasing word. "You'd miss it; I know you would."

"Get serious for a second." A half-hearted jab to her solar plexus, which she deflects as if from a toddler.

"Four-twenty-five." A wicked grin. "You're gonna need to finish fast."

"What?" I resist the urge to blink, dodging away from what would otherwise be a fatal thrust of her talons. I'm certain that she'd pull it for my sake; fairly certain.

"If you wanna get something from this, you're gonna need to finish fast. You said we just have a few minutes, right? Four minutes and fifteen seconds by my count."

"Then stop," an awkward stooping of my shoulders allows me to evade another thrust at throat-level, "And let me talk for a second."

"Gettin' soft, Cupcake?" She halts for the moment, nevertheless agitatedly jolting to and fro before me, as if a boxer preparing for a bout.

"I'm serious." My hands are upraised in defense, but rather listlessly.

"So am I. You know I'm not the type to be tied down. Well, unless it's with ropes." A knee-gelatinizing, smoldering smile. "I love the chase."

"It's not possible anymore. Things are different."

"Things always change. Doesn't mean that they're any worse." A brief and virtually imperceptible flicker of sorrow; it vanishes so swiftly that, if I weren't so familiar with her, I'd suspect that it had been a figment of my fatigued imagination.

"Come with me." I exhort, no longer bothering with the combative flirtation.

"Come catch me, then." She vanishes through an adjacent doorway, and I stupidly follow her as if a directionless duckling. I'm certain that my chest is collapsing with the impact of her leg across my sternum, my lungs aflame as her bewilderingly powerful hands seize my shoulders; my back thunders against decrepit plaster, her fierce eyes blazing through the murky, neon-streaked darkness. The distant luminosity casts a lurid crimson gleam across her face, accentuating every elegant curve; it's familiar, reminiscent of an Ikebukuro hotel.

The transition from feral psychosis to an almost impossibly delicate caress of her gloved hand across my cheek is as well; the sudden limpid tenderness flooding through her eyes; the hitching of my breath in my likely shattered chest; the tentative stroke of my tongue across my lips. Her own part with an utterly beauteous smile, and I feel my eyes closing, a quiet whimper silenced by the blistering warmth of her mouth. It begins so delicately, lips melding together with a molten, moist heat, one palm clasped upon my cheek as my arms envelop her, tugging her nearer; her other hand is braced upon the small of my back as I arch against her, feeling her knee begin to nudge apart my legs.

A slick, velveteen stroke of her tongue sends my eyes jolting open again, and I begin to moan in earnest, totally oblivious to my surroundings, as her thigh grazes that throbbing core of longing; a mischievous nip at my lips, and she plunders my mouth, no longer so gentle. She's rocking against me, or I am against her, feeling that yearning soar ever further with every passing instant. I've merely the vaguest awareness of the passage of time, my limbs liquefying with each pivot against the firm, but pliant, perfection of her leg.

"I, I..." I haven't for weeks; I haven't even touched myself, ignoring that seemingly irrepressible need that boils forth at even the minutest thought of her, of the delicate, expert ministrations of her full lips and slim, elegant fingers.

"Clear!" A harsh, snarling man's voice, muffled and distorted by a gas mask; it seems impossibly close.

"Fuck!" I'm not certain if it's my voice or hers as she jolts away, robbing me of that transcendental caress at the final moment. I'm gasping, face flushed, straining; a hypersensitive, coruscating arc of pure longing rippling through me, upon the cusp of exploding at even the subtlest caress further.

"Your guys, Princess?" It's not that familiar, teasing tone; she's as aggravated as I am, breathless and tortured. Her voice is ragged, disrupted with each severe, panting intake of breath.

"Yeah." Oh, how I despise them.

"Keeping up appearances?" I know what she's implying- it's as stupid for me to refuse her perpetual overtures to join her as it is for me to plead with her at every turn to accept Gray Section's contract and pardon.

"Come on. Please." One final, breathless plea.

"There she is!" The familiar snarl of the tactical commander, and Shego has already evaporated from my sight in the instant required to turn to the invader; her trail is prominently emphasized with a flickering, molten strand of plasma, tiny globules drifting as eery, ethereal wisps through the penumbra. "You let her get away." The commander is transparently irate; he's no longer such a simpering buffoon.

"Stay the hell out of my way, Chang." I command. "You distracted me; I had her." If only.

"Fuck." He's clutching the bulbous, matte-black contours of what seems a virtually comic weapon; it's actually a child's implement, a paintball marker, converted to discharge anesthetic gas pellets with a level of pressure that probably wouldn't be parent-approved. He's well behind me, tiny legs and massive boots hammering across the crumbling floor as I follow in pursuit. Rounding a corner, a slim metallic cartridge 'accidentally' glides from my belt- with the aid of a skillful stroke of my fingers-, rattling across the scuffed and warped wood of the abandoned apartment; a ragged portal has been torn through one of the walls with what seems to be a bomb or sledge hammer, and she's awaiting me beyond it, poised before what had doubtlessly once been a spectacular bay window. At present, it's a vacant frame, the glass long since sundered from its enclosure; the dismal Shanghai skyline silhouettes her, and she the skyline with her own unearthly aura.

"Fuck! The hell!" Chang's scream is uniquely rewarding, following a rending thunderclap that I'm astonished hadn't leveled the apartment block. It's not fatal; simply a supernaturally potent flashbang grenade that'll incapacitate him for several hours with spectral afterimages and terminal tinnitus. "Damn you, you fucking bitch! Where the hell'd you go? Get back here!" He warbles, voice distorted by what's doubtlessly the sense of being amidst a billion clanging bells.

"Sorry, Chang." I offer the least-contrite apology in the history of the human race not accompanied by the crossing of fingers. "Shego! Damn it, please! Just talk to me for a few seconds." I call out, slowing as I approach. "We can't keep doing this."

"So come with me." She commands, turning away from the window; her tone is no longer so teasing or tender. She seems truly aggrieved, her outstretched hand wreathed with a liquid flame. It blazes with an almost bewildering intensity, more powerfully concentrated than I've ever witnessed; it's virtually black, a retina-scouring, rippling void. "Come with me." She repeats, her voice gripped with a sorrow that seems to engulf my very soul, crushing away every semblance of life; I feel as if I'll simply collapse to my knees and weep from that, from the unbelievable desolation manifest so powerfully in those words. For a brief instant, she appears absolutely ancient.

"W-what?"

"Come with me. I'm getting too old for this game. It's not so fun anymore, Kim." Her pronunciation of my name is more vicious than any physical blow; I've never heard it so dismally. She's wailed it at the apogee of absolutely transcendent ecstasy; she's whispered it with an impossible tenderness; she's murmured it in her sleep while I clung to every shred of wakefulness, unwilling to deprive myself of that rarefied joy of her embrace. I've never heard it imbued with such utter agony.

"W-what are you talking about?"

"I let you know I was here because I thought you'd also feel it; that you'd know that we can't just keep doing this." A beat. "Have you been with anyone else?"

"What the hell're you talking about?" She thinks I'm unfaithful to her?

"The answer doesn't matter; it's okay if you have." There's a depressing, awful resignation in those words.

"God, no." I accentuate that with a vigorous shake of my head, feeling my loosening hair whip against my cheeks. "No. No one but you."

"Then why in the hell aren't we together? Always, I mean. We've slept together; we're... We're in love, right? Isn't that right?" The flame is expanding around her palm, boiling across her arm, coiling in a serpentine flood across her shoulder. It seems a living presence unto itself as it caresses her skin.

"I... Yes." We've never spoken those words. I can feel that emotion so powerfully, but she's never allowed me to say it; perhaps I've never permitted myself. It's been perennially deferred to some indefinite future date; some distant time when everything will be totally, implausibly ordinary.

"Then come with me. I've missed you so much. Please." I've never witnessed such aching frailty from her.

"I..." What can be said? It's not as if I've never considered it; I don't even understand why I haven't, why I wouldn't leap at that opportunity in an instant. Is it some preadolescent sense of justice? Is it simply habit, or a fear of disrupting our dynamic?

"Come with me." She orders, and I realize that I'm complying, stepping toward her.

"I... Why now? Why won't you just come with me? I don't want to be running all of the time. I don't want to shame my family; I don't want to need to steal and fight to survive everyday." I don't care about that. Why the hell am I even saying this?

"Oh. Oh, I see." Her laughter is chilling, a haunting and reverberant, lilting giggle; it seems mad. "This is familiar."

"W-what the hell're you talking about?"

"I'm taking you with me, Kim. At long last, I'm taking you with me." It occurs to me that she's no longer where I recall, rocketing across the void with a supernatural agility; and it's not her traditional superhuman strength and swiftness. I can cope with that; with this, I feel as if I'm simply completely still while time accelerates around me.

I'm barely able to raise my hands in defense as the first blow hammers against me. It's simultaneously crippling and utterly painless, as if I've been anesthetized by the crushing force of the impact. My screams are silent, refusing to escape my lips as I'm forced into a spiraling arc; my elbows feel as if they've been shattered as they plunge into the brittle wooden floor. My instincts finally force me into action, eluding a palm-strike that actually rips through the material, vaulting to my feet and delivering a series of fierce, swift blows in self-defense. I realize that her attack hasn't merely pierced the floor; a seismic ripple has sheared through it, opening a goliathan tear.

"Come with me! Come with me! I'm sick of being alone; I can't live like this anymore." She's raving, though they may as well be my words. "I don't want to fight you."

"Stop!" My shout dissolves into a garbled stream of panic-stricken syllables as my feet, expecting reasonably solid purchase, plunge through open air; I've maneuvered into the gap. Time slows inexplicably, and I've the truly awful sense that I'll be experiencing every microsecond as if it's a cruel, unalterable eternity until my death. Her eyes widen in nanosecond increments, horrified, her hand lashing out to no avail as I glide through the opening, a liquid anguish sloshing through my skull as it clatters against the jagged vestiges of the floorboards. Nothing.

"Are you listening, Dear?" My eyes open with a rather languorous flutter, my blinks forming a manic tattoo as I struggle to reorient myself. I recognize the voice; it's gentle, feminine, though slightly cross. For the briefest of instants, I'm certain that I shouldn't, and I've the curious image of a brilliant emerald flame and some form of pulsating light. And eyes; beautiful, intense eyes, widened with grief.

"Oh, yes. Um, I was listening. I'm sorry, mother." Yes, of course; it's my mother. She glowers at me, her pretty features contorted with a familiar aggravation.

"Of course you weren't listening, were you, Kimberly?" Occasionally, mother still speaks with an English accent, particularly when she pronounces my name.

"I... I'm quite certain that I was." Blinking again, it occurs to me that everything is perfectly ordinary, but hopelessly abnormal for reasons I can't quite identify. For one, I've an odd, niggling sense of motion, as if the ground is pitching at minute angles underfoot. We're also within a constraining wooden chamber, a stout dresser- surmounted by an elegantly-arched mirror- decorated with an impressively vast wealth of toiletries and a gorgeous gilded brush, studded with slightly warped bristles. A slender black choker, adorned with a slim emerald disc, encircles mother's throat, and she's clad in a fine green gown, ruffled skirt flowing around her slim legs.

"What was I saying, then, Kimberly?" I hate it when she pronounces my name in that manner, with such palpable accusation. Of course I wasn't listening; it doesn't warrant an interrogation. Her vermillion tresses pool upon her creamy shoulders, her rouged lips finally quirking into a resigned smile. She sighs. "All right."

"I'm sorry, mother." I am, for reasons that slightly escape me. Glancing down, it occurs to me that I'm clad in a ridiculously uncomfortable pair of shoes that are totally, impossibly tolerable.

"You're anxious. I am, too, dear. We've been away from your father for a year." A slightly dark cast to her features. She lowers the stout, leather-bound text to a fine wooden table beside the bed draped in truly beautiful linens; it occurs to me that I shouldn't be bothering with this hellish chair that was probably designed by a true beast. "Still, I hope he'll be pleased with your progress in English."

"Ah... _Yes_." Why does it seem so completely ordinary for that to be so difficult to pronounce?

"Have you managed to read any of your bible in English?"

"Uh..." An anguished moment of silence. "It's difficult, mother."

"You speak German perfectly well. What is so difficult about English?"

"It makes no sense." And it doesn't. German is orderly and organized; and it's proper and upstanding to speak it.

"French makes no sense either, but you learned that."

"And there are romances in French, mother." And works that would invite a terrible lashing if she ever learned I'd read them.

"Kimberly Dmitriovna." I shouldn't upset her; she has no patience for disobedience. She's as intolerant as the stereotypical Englishwoman, which is what she is, and equally as stubborn. That, I understand, is the reason for which I have an English given name. My father can't refuse her anything.

"I've had just about enough. I don't think I can teach you; I don't know if you can be taught." She hasn't taught me anything except for the frustration of learning English from my mother. Natalya Federovna was my governess; she wasn't willing to travel to this godforsaken place with us, however. Even the bulk of our servants have remained with the family estate. I don't understand why we've been made to come to China. It's a terrible, unchristian place, I've been told. That seemed to upset mother enormously, but she's nevertheless dragging me to some dismal city. To Shanghai.

"I'm sorry, mother." I'm sorry that I have no interest in learning English, I do not add.

"We'll be there soon." She glances at the broad circular window. Porthole, I correct myself mentally. Vasilevich was a sailor; he told me that the word is porthole. The sky is a majestic, azure splendor beyond the sealed glass, and I'm bound within this stagnant, stuffy cabin, pleading for a storm to capsize us and halt our journey with a blissful finality.

"How soon?" I hope that wasn't as terrible a whine as it probably seemed.

"You mustn't be so impatient, Kimberly." Mother settles onto the chair opposite mine, the dense bible thumping finally onto the table as she lifts and releases it again. I have no time for it; it's not as if I read it religiously, anyway. Mother would be scandalized, and I'm sure that I would suffer a terrible beating, but I've found a great deal that seems hopelessly wrong with it. I feel that so much of it is wrong, particularly how cruelly it's taught; the blood and fire; especially those poor people that are left out of it. Even mother admits that the Grossmanns are a fine family. Sometimes, I feel rather excluded, as well.

"Yes, mother." I offer her a glum murmur. I'm miserable; I hope that she's not entertaining any illusions to the contrary. We were forced out of our own country three years ago amid unspeakable violence; even though I was fourteen, I can recall the shooting, the screaming, the fear that overtook those that had been so unyieldingly powerful. I can remember the scenes on Nevskii Prospekt, the upheaval and savagery; the bewildering, jumbled emotions as everything so familiar and comfortable was wrested forth from its secure roots and thrown into impossible anarchy.

We abandoned so many of our friends; our home; our lives. I'd learned French and German with the other girls at Smolniy; everything was so intimate, so comfortable, even amid the bitter chill of the classrooms and the startlingly austere dormitories. I... I was forced to abandon Ariadne, those lengthy and serene evenings together; just being together, occasionally taking her hand, feeling that uncanny sense of calm and completion.

Father forced us to Paris, refusing to just cooperate with the Revolution. What would have been so difficult about that? I know that we're wealthy; I know now, especially, with a finer sense of how much we have that others don't. But, why did we need that? Why couldn't we just have kept our home and Russia? Was the factory that important? Were the jewels and our servants more important than my friendship with Ariadne, than our homeland?

I've never spoken with him about this. I mentioned it once to mother, and felt her palm crack across my cheek like a spiteful serpent. I hate the French; I hate France. But, at least it became familiar; and there were Russians there, a vast flock of them, though most were just angry, bitter old men and women and their annoying, regal children, whining about all that they've lost. They've forgotten than they're Russians, and they've forgotten why that matters; they can only quail about the Revolution, about the Tsar, about Lenin, about everything that we've lost.

"Kimberly?"

"Yes, mother." My mind has wandered again, as always. At the very least, the French like to dance; their girls and boys know how to dance so well, it's nearly like being in Saint Petersburg again. I'm amazed at how Russian mother is now, that she acts like those dowdy old patricians, even with her flaming scarlet hair and odd affectation.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"No. I'm sorry." It's nearly impossible to lie to mother.

"That's all right." A resigned sigh, and I feel her hand clasp upon mine. "I know you miss our home."

"I miss Saint Petersburg. I miss everything like it was. I miss Ariadne." I don't know what happened to her; it's hardly startling that my letters were never delivered, though I'd entertained a feebly flickering flame of hope that she'd perhaps eventually arrive. Mother's features darken subtly when I mention her, and I don't quite understand why, though I've somehow the sense that she never approved of how close we were.

"I know, Dear." A gentle squeeze of my hand. As her lips part to begin a motherly admonition that I should concentrate upon the future and embrace our opportunities, a thundering warble of a horn belches forth from the upper deck. It continues at extraordinary length, and I vault from my seat, dashing to the window, engulfed in a curious thrall of unrelieved anxiety. I've been dreading this moment, but I can't resist the compulsion to gaze upon what awaits us.

I'm astonished: even with the narrow wedge of the harbor unfolding before the porthole, it's as if a momentous school of lumbering, smoke-belching fish have surfaced around us, their tinier brethren darting and dashing amid the vast, churning wakes of truly elephantine vessels like ours. We've begun to pivot subtly, and, as the liner arcs toward its dock and slows, I've the image of a tremendous, bustling metropolis. It's not of the diligently-plotted, elegant and mathematical quality of Saint Petersburg. It bears a greater resemblance to a horrifyingly overgrown Paris; a vast phalanx of stout structures soars skyward along the waterfront, a bridge trailing away from them. And people; even at this distance, the sheer, insectine throng of humanity is positively unbelievable. I'm certain that they're a great, rippling sea of humanity, though they're little more than ants through the vague suggestion of murky mist that hovers upon the water.

"We're here." I announce with a peculiar ambivalence, as if I'm not certain if I'm proclaiming our arrival at a party or a funeral.

"What do you think, Dear?"

"About what?" The lazy, graceful turn seems to be resolving into a focused, forward advance, canted subtly toward the great artificial bank of the quay.

"Shanghai."

"It's huge." And it is. Admittedly, I know nothing else about it; no one's told me anything but what a dreadfully fierce and frightful city it is, of opium dens and debauchery that mother insists is unchristian to discuss. My brothers have chattered about nothing but the great mysteries that await, as if the romances of Sherlock Holmes will be found there. With a weary intake of stagnant cabin air, it occurs to me that I'm already quite bored with it. It's probably silly and childish, but I can't restrain a certain sense that it's like any other city; the people are exactly the same as everyone else. They're simply Chinese.

"Are you ready to see your father again?"

"Yes." I don't hesitate in affirming that. Father is as congenial as mother is difficult and domineering; his fixation is lavishing the treatment of a princess upon me, even as mother lectures me interminably about manners and a proper education.

"And to study?"

"Yes, mother." My exuberance deflates almost tangibly at that.

"We've found a governess for you. She's a Chinese, but don't treat her poorly. She's very knowledgeable, your father says; and she speaks perfect German, so you can't claim that she's not teaching you correctly."

"Yes, mother." Wonderful. Uprooted from my home, forced into an alien city, and mother's first priority is for me to resume my dreadfully bland studies with some withered, aged Chinese crone who can scream at me in German.

"Well, shall we see what your brothers are up to, Dear?" Finally, an opportunity to be away from this loathsome cabin. I can't conceive of why she maintains this ridiculous notion that it's unseemly or unladylike to be upon the deck; it's not as if the regular passengers are cannibals or monsters. I'm already barreling through the doorway as deftly as I can manage upon my heels, clinging to the folds of my skirt with expertly practiced precision. The corridor is expansive, paneled in glorious teak that stunningly captures the luminous caress of the sun pouring through one of the broad windows that are definitely too terribly massive to be deemed mere portholes. Mother follows patiently behind me as I lurch toward that expansive portal, beholding a perspective upon the ever-growing city that dwarfs the narrow glimpse that I enjoyed from the cabin.

I realize that the dark smear along the quay is actually an improbable flood of bodies, and I strain my eyes in search of father, realizing that he must be awaiting us amidst the throng. "Do you think father's there?"

"I should hope so." A mild chuckle from mother. I haven't heard such a relieved laugh for months. She's been miserable without father; even his letters elicit barely a smile now. "How else would we find the house?"

"Is it like our house in Paris?" Presumably not. From what I've seen thus far, though, the bulk of the buildings would be as comfortable on the Seine as they would be the Whangpoo. I've been visualizing heaps of pagodas and temples, men in arcane robes drifting serenely across solemn avenues presided over by colossal icons of the Buddha. There's not even an emperor any longer. Then again, I suppose that there isn't even a Tsar in our homeland.

"I don't know, Dear." She's joined me, peering at the cargo-clotted dockyards and bustling harbor facilities, teamsters hustling to and fro with almost manic, antlike intensity; but they're beginning to resolve into ever greater focus, and I can nearly visualize father and the manservant about which he wrote. Chang, he wrote. He's a small fellow, apparently, unlike father, but very swift. He was supposedly a monk, and is father's bodyguard when the need arises, which frightened me; I don't very much like the thought of anyone needing a bodyguard.

"Will there be another civil war?" I feel her hand harshly upon my shoulder at that. My thought was more of what I'd read in the newspapers about China, but I can't precisely claim that I haven't thought of Russia, either.

"Perish the thought, Dear." If only she were truly as unworried as her words suggest. "Shanghai is safe; it's mostly European."

"Huh?" That's a perplexing notion.

"We're living in the international concession; the civilized part." Mother is obviously unenthusiastic about meeting any Chinese.

"Won't my governess be a Chinese?"

"She's been educated. Uplifted. By a German, I hear." There are times when I wonder if mother quite knows what she's talking about, though I don't ever voice those doubts.

"Oh." A beat. "Is she nice? Has father written anything about her?"

"Nothing." Her features darken subtly in the reflection upon the shimmering glass. "But I'm certain everything will be fine."

"Oh."

"Hey, Kim!" One sentence, but in stereo; I can't restrain a grimace at the odd duality of that exclamation, turning to confront Timofei and Dmitri. They love mocking my hopelessly un-Russian name at every opportunity; I rue the day those lice learned the diminutive.

"What do you want?" I snarl; for once, mother doesn't complain.

"You should be more polite to your older sister, boys. Where have you two been? Mitya, Tim?" It doesn't seem to bother Timofei to have his name Anglicized; I think that it's gaudy.

"On deck. It's totally amazing." They speak in unison; a brief glance at mother indicates that it's as disorienting and headache-inducing as it is for me.

"Is this so? What did you see?"

"Lotsa boats. And ships. And everything. It's totally amazing. Shanghai's huge!"

"I can see that from the window. Was there anything else?"

"Well, I mean... There're a lotta gunboats in the harbor." Dmitri reports. I can't quite overcome how ominous that seems.

"What?" Mother doesn't seem entirely rapturous about that, either. "Show me, Mitya."

"Over there, mother." He gesticulates to an impressive flotilla of eight vessels in firm formation, hurtling across the bay at full steam, oily plumes of smoke erupting from the stacks enveloped by several gun batteries. Their destination isn't immediately apparent, but I can't restrain a visceral spurt of fear at that image; I've seen the effects of machine-guns upon human beings, and the bulbous cones at the peaks of the Maxim guns conjure an image of nothing but a terrifying afternoon on Nevskiy Prospekt, of rioters wading into the thumping, stuttering fusillade from the defending troops.

"What do you think they're doing, mother?" Dmitri seems absolutely entranced. Naturally, he'd have no remembrance of the Revolution except as a distant memory of thunder and havoc that interrupted his naps.

"I don't know." Her reply suggests that she's as enthusiastic as I am.

"Do you think they're chasing pirates or smugglers?" Timofei is stupid; he seems truly exhilarated by that notion.

"I don't know. Let's go to the upper deck and get some fresh air, children."

"All right." They agree in tandem; I find myself rooted to the spot, continuing to observe the trail of sickening black evaporating into the distance behind the gunboats.

"Come, Kimberly. We'll be there soon."

"Where are Vasilevich and the others?" I ask distractedly, finally turning away from the infinitesimal wisp that barely survives before my eyes.

"They'll be readying our things, I would imagine." Vasilevich and his fellows are the few servants that were willing to join us, but even they didn't seem that enthusiastic about Shanghai. "So, are you boys excited to see Shanghai?" Apparently mother expects that their addle-headed enthusiasm will be as contagious as cholera.

"Sure. It has to be more fun than Paris." What a simple-minded notion.

"All right, then. Let's go to the upper deck." I'm led with a rather firm grip toward one of the remarkably steep, curling staircases; the ascent is a bit more challenging than I would have desired, prodded forward by mother and weighed down by a sense of almost supernatural dread. As the door parts, however, and a crisp, spray-tinged breeze washes across my face, it's not quite so terrifying, even in the midst of the dull dissonance of innumerable engines groaning and muttering their way across the harbor. There's an incredible wealth of passengers on deck, men and women adorned with an impressive array of suits and dresses; trendy and stodgy alike, they're transfixed by the sight of the city bulging across the horizon. I realize that it dominates everything; that, for the total arc of my vision, there's absolutely nothing but Shanghai. And, approaching the railing, I discover that the colossal merchant and navy ships are joined by impressive rafts of sampans and fishing trawlers, their occupants clad in rags and native attire, gesticulating angrily and energetically at one another as they negotiate the congested waterway.

We're finally beginning to pull into port, and I can at last see the congregating well-wishers in great detail. I haven't yet any inkling of which is father, but there's an incredible preponderance of motorcars and rickshaws, carriages and other conveyances arrayed with errant indifference to order around them, along with heaps of luggage and towering mounds of crates. Innumerable men and women gesture and wave toward the arriving ships, and I squint into the distance in search of anyone approaching father's prodigious height. It's often joked that he must be the true son of Alexander The Third; he's a giant, bellowing and almost ostentatiously exuberant. Mother is the total opposite, so I often wonder how they ever found one another.

The low, mournful warble of the ship's horn rolls across the deck, and I feel as if I'm in the midst of a turbulent swarm of lost souls; it vanishes in a moment, but continues to echo through my senses for what seems a virtual eternity until it at last trickles into my distant awareness. We're truly slowing, appearing to coast toward the waiting embrace of our berth.

"We're finally here." It's been weeks; I've the sense that we've traveled for decades. The romantic image of the _Odyssey_ leaps to mind; if only it had been that interesting.

"I'm glad." Mother appears truly relieved at that affirmation. If I'm to be here, or anywhere, away from anything familiar and normal, at least it's off of this stupid liner. I also feel a certain visceral dislike for the name of the vessel: the _Titan_ sounds much too similar to the _Titanic_. At the very least, we haven't collided with anything; yet, in any event. I suppose that there's still time to sink until we drift into our mooring. That actually conjures a slightly manic smile from me.

"Is something amusing, Kimberly?" Mother must be a clairvoyant; she always seems to realize when I'm thinking of something perfectly dreadful and grotesque.

"Nothing. Really." I offer her a hopelessly innocent smile which would probably inflame her suspicions further. "Absolutely nothing."

"You look cheeky, dear. Like a little monkey." Everything is like a monkey from her perspective.

"Sorry, mother." Cheek suppressed.

"Excuse me, madame, but we're pulling into port." A gleeful statement of the obvious from one of the dapper, youthful deckhands. Vasilevich ridicules them in Russian. They have penguin suits and soft hands, he complains; he says they've never known the lash of the quartermaster's whip. He's handsome, as are the bulk of them, probably little more than my age, but there's not the giddy, squealing delight that they seem to provoke on the part of the other girls that simply can't keep themselves away from the sight of the young men charging across the ship. I've come to know a few of the other well-to-do daughters, and they're dreadfully boring; not one of them seems to know who Dostoevsky and Chekhov are- all they can talk about is _le jazz hot_ and other bland, trendy nonsense. Not one of them speaks Russian, even if I speak French flawlessly; and not one of them seems to think anything about tossing around their parents' wealth like royalty.

"Thank you." Mother barely acknowledges him. I've seen how they stare at her; she's alone, and beautiful, and it's disgusting that they would ogle a married woman like that with her daughter. I don't particularly care for the looks that I've attracted, either. "We'll be prepared soon."

"Very good, madame." He totters away.

"Ain't nothin' like the sea air, 'm I right, missus?" Vasilevich's bellow is more thunderous than the horn, and an enormous smile parts my lips as I've the sight of the man darting across the deck upon a false leg as if he's competing in the Olympics. Vasilevich lost his leg at Tsushima, and he never neglects an opportunity to regale us with the ghoulish and graphic tales of life and death at sea. Timofei and Dmitri love it; I do, as well, even if mother forces me to be perfectly disinterested or appalled by the ghastly portrayals of heroism and slaughter, of shells and bullets ripping through bodies and pulverizing ships. Especially of the triumphant heroism of the Russian navy, and particularly the common sailors over their useless and lazy officers.

"Evgeny Vasilevich, where have you been?" Mother is probably the one member of the family that bothers with his given name, and the old man- well, he's probably forty, but weathered from the sea, endless toil, and an abundance of vodka- greets that with what mother probably considers unacceptable cheek. But, Vasilevich, even with his sardonic grin that seems to engulf half of his face, is an eternally loyal servant; his father was, and his father's father... They've been with the family since they were serfs, and never abandoned us.

"Sorry, missus. Been below-decks with the lads and ladies, just gatherin' your things. We're all ready ta go, you wanna ship out now."

"Is everyone ready?"

"Yes'm, everythin's ready for ya." Unlike the other servants, who often border upon the obsequious, Vasilevich can't quite manage a single ounce of propriety, aside from the ubiquitous 'missus' or 'ma'am' for mother. My father's just 'Cap'n'. His attention shifts to us, his smile widening further. "Did I ever tell ye 'bout the time we sailed right past here on the way to Port Arthur?"

"I think we can hear the stories when we're on dry land, Evgeny Vasilevich." Timofei and Dmitri groan with disappointment, and I can barely resist it, as well.

"Dry land? Ain't nothin' duller'n dry land, missus. A real man's got to be out on the sea, livin' under the sky and breathin' coal'r oil fumes. 'M I right, lads?"

"Right!" A jubilant chorus of agreement from the twins; if it weren't for mother, I'd be agreeing wholeheartedly. As it is, I'm to be a proper lady, as if being a lady alone isn't amply tedious.

"Well, no one here is a real man yet, so I think we'll all be comfortable enough on land, Evgeny Vasilevich."

"Yes'm." Vasilevich offers us a wink. "C'mon, boys, ya gotta listen t'yer mother; ain't nobody else gonna weep for you out at sea but yer mother."

"All right." They manage to whine in tandem, as well, and we return to the lower decks, my feet managing to drag more weightily than I can recall upon the ascent. I may be relieved to be away from this dreadful floating prison, but I'm not drastically more exuberant about Shanghai, even if I'll be seeing father again. I don't want another governess, and I certainly don't care for the thought of being even further away from the familiar. As boring as it is, France is still Europe; it's still civilized. China seems a totally different world.

We're greeted by our maids: Maria Vladimirova, and her sister, Valentina; and Vasilevich's assembled men whose names I can never manage to remember. I've begun to suspect that they simply change them to confuse me; the only one that's familiar is a Tatar, Timur, who tends to greet me with shy smiles. I think that he's handsome, but I'd never mention anything of the sort to mother, who seemed terrified by thought of a Mohammedan in our retinue; but father's family has had them as retainers for centuries.

"Everything is ready, missus." Maria and Valentina are identical twins, and extremely pretty. I've often envied their roundness and the dark, flowing curls that are perennially bound into sleek braids, particularly as I seem to be invisible whenever I'm in their presence. What distinguishes them is the color of the clasps that bind their gorgeous locks. I believe that Maria spoke; it's difficult to be certain.

"Excellent, Maria." Mother can distinguish between them with barely the slightest trace of effort. I suppose that virtually raising the girls would endow her with a mother's intuition.

They're encumbered by a fairly modest array of baggage, given how monstrously encumbered Vasilevich's men are; they sag beneath the concentrated enormity of the parcels and trunks with which we traveled, or accumulated at brief visits to ports en route. Vasilevich somehow reliably manages to admonish them for their shambling indolence while avoiding any burden himself, being their self-appointed quartermaster.

"Shall we be off, men? Hop to it, you lazy curs! Move it!" Vasilevich commands, tipping an illusory cap atop his graying mane to Maria and Valentina, who indulge him with a giggle- palms politely clasped before their lips- and a mild blush. They're barreling with characteristically Russian exuberance- perhaps bombasticness- along the corridor, shouldering past several disoriented and irritated passengers, their own servants, aids, and butlers in tow. Maria and Valentina remain with mother and me; I notice that Dmitri and Timofei are with Vasilevich, a pair of wolf pups eternally in the presence of their unofficial (and thoroughly unapproved) mentor.

Technically, Maria is my maid, and Valentina mother's, though it's not as if they can ever be separated for greater than a few seconds. I've the odd sense that they literally must exist together, that their bond as twins is reinforced by some gossamer, metaphysical thread that perpetually tethers them. They're ordinarily with me, aiding me with some tedious project (their English somehow much, much more competent than mine, though they perennially protest the contrary) or brushing through the enormous flood of crimson streaming along my back that becomes an unruly nightmare if it's not maintained on virtually an hourly basis. I love being with them: they're not a substitute for Ariadne, but I can feel a similar sense of serene contentment with the twins, never mind that curious warmth that blossoms so beautifully through my chest.

"Aren't you excited about Shanghai, miss?" Maria and Valentina never bother with the honorific when we're alone; I've pleaded with them to simply address me as Kimberly, and they've finally relented. Mother becomes furious whenever proper class relations aren't obeyed, though.

"I- I don't know." Thank you, Valentina, for forcing me to ponder this again.

"Vasilevich has told us so much about it, although most of those aren't details that I think will be relevant for us, miss." I can only imagine. Vasilevich tends to believe that everyone's a similarly coarse sailor, though it's definitely a refreshing departure from the stilted pomp and stifling banality of the transplanted court and its self-declared aristocrats.

"I hope it will be fun." A thoroughly inane and anemic remark. I truthfully don't care. Maria and Valentina tend to be with me when I study, and attend to me with the governess, but they're not _obligated_ to listen to the interminable yammering and lecturing of some decrepit crone who apparently can't even recall what life was. I've heard quite enough of Caesar's victories, of the marches of long-extinct armies through lands no longer in the grip of their conquerors; of the foibles and insipid courtly scandals masquerading as great events. I can't quite claim to have lived a great deal of my own life, simply consigned to the vastly-looming shadows of the dead.

My previous governess was ancient; I've the sense that she can probably recall, from personal memory, when the serfs were clamoring for emancipation. She'd likely learned Mongol to minister as governess to the Tartars' children. That's an amusing image, the thought of that shrill, rigid, eternally upright shrew deigning to even acknowledge the existence of those that she perennially labels as 'uncivilized' in her lectures. Everyone not European is 'uncivilized'; the 'Asiatic peoples' are 'uncivilized'; the 'African peoples' are 'negro heathens'. I don't even wish to reflect upon her opinions about everyone else.

"What do you think they eat in Shanghai?" When the twins aren't monopolizing everyone's attention with their buxom beauty, they're inspiring incredulity with their irrepressible appetites. I've the sense that every morsel they enjoy flows directly to their chests. Glancing down at the fairly modest swell beneath my dress, it occurs to me that I rather lack that unique blessing.

"Shainghainese?" Maria offers Valentina a giggle.

"We'll see when we finally see, girls." Mother's behavior toward them is odd; it's insanely contradictory, truly. She enforces this irritating distance between master and servant for everyone else, and yet approaches them as if they're simply a further pair of daughters.

"Yes, ma'am." They chorus in unison, bounding behind mother as she, a paragon of maternal decisiveness and confidence, strides through the corridor toward the first class gangway. I'm astonished how adroit she is with such an enormous gown, a bustle flaring behind her hips, as she heads the procession of the maids; they're content with rather sleek black dresses, shot with pale ivory strands, lengthy skirts frilled at ankle level.

I, for my part, simply linger behind them sullenly, pondering when- or even if- I'll manage to adjust to the notion of living in yet another bizarre and unfamiliar land. Father wrote, and mother mentioned, that we'll be living in the international settlement, and not the French concession, though those terms may as well be Greek for what they actually mean to me. I'm shuffling toward that inevitable destiny, hoping that someone will speak French or German or Russian; or that, somehow, impossibly, we'll stumble across Ariadne and her family. I barely even notice the ever-expanding, albeit polite, swell of tastefully-attired passengers thronging around us, nodding my patient acknowledgment to a series of apologies in a number of languages; I can't believe how excruciating this voyage has been, and this final crush is simply another of the sundry insults I've confronted.

"Sorry, miss."

"Excuse me, miss."

"_Pardon_."

"Entschuldigung."

"_Sumimasen_."

"Fine." Not a single Russian amongst them. At last, however, trailing behind mother and the twins, I've a glimpse of daylight; it's a curious, diffuse, dappled luminescence, streaked with the coiling tendrils of mist that continue to boil forth from the turbid harbor waters. And it finally strikes me: we've arrived. There's no longer the quiet, muffled murmur of refined and polite voices; no longer the grinding tedium of the interminable muteness of the water; no longer the grumble of the turbines. At once, there's life, and it's absolutely overpowering.

The gangplank beneath ours, narrower and rickety, trailing at a peculiar slant onto another portion of the dock, is riotous with a thunderous babel of innumerable languages, each rising in a desperate struggle to be heard above the other. I can hear Russians amongst those, howling playful obscenities and discussing the future that awaits them; there are Germans speaking with an odd affectation, mulling whose friends are awaiting whom; English, Irish, Spanish, so many. And before us, as I cant my body to peer around the shuffling stream of humanity that seems to be emerging from the ark, two by two, the docks are simply an ocean of life. The thump and clamor of equipment, of crates and boxes being hefted, thrown, carted, and shattered; the upraised groans and growls of exertion; the excited, chattering exchanges in what I'm certain must be Chinese, an odd series of harsh, abrupt pitches; the low quail of distant horns; even what I'm sure is a gunshot. Everything manages to meld into a single, transcendental cacophony, and I realize that I'm smiling. This is something unique.

"Come, Dear. Don't straggle." That would obviously be unseemly, even if I'm presently in the throes of a sudden blissful epiphany that this might not be quite so terrible. I quicken my pace, easing directly behind Maria, and momentarily ponder tugging at that immense, lustrous braid before I hear a resounding cry of, "Dmitri!" It's also my brother's name, but I've never heard mother pronounce it in that manner when addressing him; it's as if father's the one remaining man on earth, and she's suddenly resuming their acquaintance following an eternity of separation. Even when they've parted for merely an hour, she exclaims it as if his death had been announced and he's returned to life. "Dmitri!"

There's no immediate reply, but I'm certain that father is awaiting us, and feel myself flush with exultation. Even if he's forced us to travel this nightmare distance to some dismal land, I can't be upset to see father again. The saline air caresses my cheeks, and I can feel my hair begin to swell with the humidity, and the glare of the sun has begun to arc directly into my eyes, but I've the odd and unaccountable sense that I'm finally home again; or at least at a reasonable approximation of it. It's not Saint Petersburg, and Ariadne probably won't be here, but our family won't be sundered so pathetically any longer. At long last, my feet find the solid concrete of the wharf behind my mother, and can no longer sustain the patience to merely follow placidly behind her.

Maneuvering around Maria, I vault toward where I'm certain that my father waits, expecting a familiar giant's embrace. And I'm not disappointed, a pair of colossal arms greeting me while a voice thunders from above, "My little bear cub! Papa's missed you so much!" I may be seventeen, but I can feel myself being hoisted from the ground as if I'm merely seven, father's large and powerful features confronting me as I'm held aloft as if a puppy.

I'm forced to crane my neck to maintain the contact of our eyes as he lowers me with a quiet laugh, an almost manic giggle of relief tearing itself from my lips as the accumulated tensions of the past weeks floods from me at that sight. Father's begun to gray a bit around his temples, but his hair, severely-cropped, remains a virtually uniform, spectacular black; a colossal mustache bristles from his upper lip; and a pair of spectacles, framed with a remarkably delicate and elegant design, rests upon the bridge of his nose.

"Papa!" I throw my arms around his enormous frame as well as I can manage, nestling against his chest, my cheek rustling against the fabric of his jacket.

"All of my girls! How have you been?" His voice rumbles in an odd duality of sound through his mouth and chest as he calls out to my mother with a truly manifest elation, and I can perceive the scent of her perfume beside me as he crushes her to him beside me.

"It's been difficult without you, Dima. We've missed you terribly." Mother doesn't allow her unchecked joy at their reunion to interfere with the obvious irritation of these circumstances.

"I know, I know, my love." He seems a bit chastened. "I know. But, I have outstanding news for you. Our business," he refers to it as 'ours', "Is flourishing. Beautifully. We have the blessing of the Council, and everything is working so well. And there are Russians here; many of them, even if they do not have our blessings." I finally peel away from him, wondering what's become of Dmitri and Timofei.

"Where are my brothers?" Where are my idiot brothers, I'd wished to ask.

"Ah, the little scoundrels are playing sailor with Vasi." Father doesn't even bother with his full patronymic; Vasilevich is simply 'Vasi' for him. "They're taking our things; we have another motorcar waiting for us." Maria and Valentina are waiting shyly behind mother, and father finally acknowledges them with yet another roaring salutation, "And Maria and Valentina! I've missed you, as well."

"Thank you, sir." My father is constantly 'sir', regardless of how familial he is with them.

"So, has everyone been well? I hope so; I have so very much to tell you." Even as father ages, he remains as energetic as a child, speaking excitedly, voice upraised, as he ushers us away from the docks. Glancing about, I've the sense that the whole of the city is congregated here, countless men and women greeting, embracing, arguing, gesturing, and simply living; hucksters hawk dubious wares; and a peculiar, slightly bitter scent boils forth from a constellation of stalls along the fringes.

"Father?"

"Yes, my darling? What is it? Did the voyage treat you well, Kimberly?" I must admit that I love those affirmations that I'm father's favorite, that the twins don't constantly overshadow me at every turn, servants or otherwise.

"It did."

"You look thinner. Did you not eat? Well, I have a surprise for you. We have a Chinese cook at the house, and what he makes is extraordinary. Simply extraordinary. We shall have to bring him with us when we vacation." That finally confirms the obvious for me: this isn't temporary. This isn't a vacation, or a diversion; we're actually expected to live here, at least for the moment.

"Do I truly need a governess?" I hope that doesn't emerge as a whine, though father's expression suggests that it probably is as we halt again.

"Kimberly-"

"What about one of the schools? Isn't there any place like Smolniy?"

"Dear, those common schools, even the best, aren't for someone of your station. You will like your governess; I'm sure of it. She speaks perfect German. Did your mother tell you that?"

"Yes, papa." I mutter.

"I know you weren't fond of Natalya Federovna; I know, Dear. But, this one is different." Is she actually a human being?

"What do you mean, papa?" I know that she's a Chinese; that doesn't render her any less dreadful a prospect as a governess.

"Oh, just come along, Kimberly. I'm not asking you to start your studies this instant; you have so much left to see." I do; I don't want to stare at a wall or a sheet of chalkboard while the world thrives and rages around me.

"Very well, father." It obviously pains him when I reply with that sullen irritation; perhaps it's a prima donna flourish, a pouting plea for attention, but it's truly genuine today. I don't want a governess. I don't desire to be bound within our home, regardless of where it is, wondering when the sun will finally dip to a dusky twilight and liberate me from Ancient Rome or Muscovy.

"Oh, don't be like that. I brought her with us; she'd like very much to meet my charming young daughter."

"Oh." A true scowl.

"Now, Kimberly, don't act like that with her. She's very nice." I notice mother's shoulders stiffen a bit at that, but my attention instantly returns to father.

"Very well." I force a preposterously cloying smile onto my lips that simply inspires a slightly resigned sigh from father.

"I trust that you'll behave, Kimberly Dmitriovna." I don't often hear my patronymic from father, but it's a warning to be a good girl and behave; I do. "There."

"Very well, father. I'll be polite. I promise." Grudgingly. I can hear the thrumming, coughing grumble of an engine; I can only imagine what sort of motorcar it is. Then, the nostril-scouring rancidness of its exhaust, pooling with the innumerable other odors, scents, aromas, and unfathomable stenches of the city, forming an almost unaccountably idiosyncratic melange. I'm not entirely pleased by what confronts us beside a pair of massive black saloons, dapper drivers offering us an obsequious series of bows as they notice my father beside us. They're obviously Chinese, tiny and compact, their suits seemingly vaguely uncomfortable; I notice that another Chinese, squatter and infinitely stouter than the others, bows more severely to father, and solely to father. That must be Chang, his manservant and bodyguard; he hasn't bothered with a suit, but is curiously draped in a refined garment of white silk, a robustly-buttoned tunic above billowing trousers.

"Chang!" Another bow, and the bodyguard approaches with a certain off-putting aloofness. Every motion is almost entrancingly graceful, however, as if a skillfully choreographed dance.

"Yes, master." I'm astonished that he speaks German so well, even if with a remarkably uneasy accent that suggests that he may have learned it with a book and a perennially drunken instructor. "Do you have need of me?"

"No, no, Chang. I just wanted to introduce you to my family. You've already met the boys."

"Yes, master." Chang is chronically impassive, tending toward compulsive bowing with any declaration. "They're very nice boys. And I have met your other menservants."

"Very good, very good." A beat. "So, where is my daughter's governess?" Chang's visage sours at that, albeit for a brief moment; I'm certain that I hear a rather nonplussed utterance under his breath.

"She is... I am sorry to say, sir, that she left to one of the stalls with the boys a few minutes ago, but I am certain she'll be returning." He seems even more irritated.

"Ah, already eager to introduce the boys to native culture. Good, good." Father is obviously delighted by that. "This is my beautiful wife, Annette, and my daughter, Kimberly. Take better care of them than you do me, Chang." A sweeping gesture to us.

"Yes, master."

"And our maids, Maria and Valentina. You will see a great deal of them; make sure that they don't find themselves in trouble, will you?"

"Yes, master." Another steep bow. Chang is completely bald, which is not what I'd expected from the illustrations I've seen of spectacular, flowing queues; but his wardrobe is perfectly Chinese, I suppose.

"Now, where are those boys?" My own eyes begin to trail impatiently about the shuffling seas of bodies, seeking out a pair of idiotic brothers; they seem to produce a beacon of concentrated annoyance, so it shouldn't be that difficult. I finally locate them, beside a figure that somehow, even at this distance, engenders a piercing jumble of utterly disorienting emotions. I'm certainly that I'll collapse to my knees from that momentary glimpse alone, though it wanes as I blink, opening my eyes again to discover them nearer. The boys have begun jogging in their ridiculous suits toward father, unleashing a yipping series of jubilant cries that somehow, staggeringly, succeed in being heard above the din.

The woman, however, simply saunters with what I'm certain mother would characterize as an undeniable cheekiness toward us. I'm transfixed, my feet anchored to the tarmac as surely as if they'd become immersed in cement; I haven't the slightest inkling of what it is, but I can't bear to glance away. She rises upon impressive black heels, and appears more fashionable than I'm certain mother would be inclined to tolerate; a subtle shimmer of silk stockings renders her legs darkly lustrous beneath the sleek and well-tapered hem of an ebon dress, shot with a deep emerald, that falls to beneath her knees, tailored in a modern cut that nevertheless appears oddly Chinese. Her hair is extraordinary, even at this distance, flooding across her shoulders and sweeping with a startlingly full, weighty presence to hip-level; a broad-brimmed black hat surmounts it, seeming to ride the bewilderingly full crest of those raven locks that appear to absorb every semblance of the day's sunlight.

"This is your governess." Father announces as she finally approaches. I realize how tall she is; she soars above Chang and the drivers, and offers us a flourishing bow of deep reverence despite an unmistakable but indefinite defiance in her posture- the set of her shoulders, the cock of her broad hips. Even her smile seems slightly provocative, regardless of how perfectly congenial, splitting open darkly-rouged lips; they seem nearly black in the cloaking shade generated by the brim of her hat.

"Uh, um." Somehow, I'm stricken with a violent shock of remembrance, though I've never once met her throughout the whole of my life; I've never once visited China, and she's certainly never called upon us in France or Russia. It's as if a memory from a distant future, and not the past, is sloshing through my mind, cruelly eluding every effort of my suddenly bleary and disoriented brain to achieve any firm and definite grasp upon it. A vibrant silver chain flickers around her throat, a stunning jade pendant swaying to and fro across the gentle swell of her chest. Her eyes glisten with a bewitching intensity, radiant and captivating; they seem nearly foxlike, gently-angled and cunning. I feel my breath hitch in my chest, words momentarily escaping my groping thoughts. "Um..."

"Kimberly." I feel mother's gentle jab, but my eyes remain upon the governess. She isn't what I'd expected, by any means. She resembles some form of modern sorceress, an oriental witch in fine couture, favoring me with an appraising gaze and slightly bemused smile.

"Kimberly." Father also prods me, though fortunately with his voice alone.

"I- my name is Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym." My cheeks alight in an absolutely blazing flush, and I curtsy in the fashion that's been ingrained into the very fabric of my mind by mother's Victorian sensibilities.

"Good day." Her voice is a luxurious purr, silk upon velvet as she delivers a fluid and supremely deferential bow. "I am Go Xi. Please, call me Xi Go."


	2. Garden

"Please, call me Xi Go." For the briefest of instants, I'm overcome again by that unaccountable sense of memory, of a distant echo of some future life reverberating into the present. A wisp of some luminous, emerald splendor arises in that surreal fraction of a second, superimposing an unearthly, glimmering aura upon her supernaturally delicate, pallid complexion; and, as before, it dissolves into the ether as my bleary senses struggle to achieve any enduring grasp. With its passage, I realize that I'm confronting my governess with a hopelessly, vacantly glazed countenance, one eye upon the past and the other the distant future, merely the vaguest inkling of the present seeping into that flailing mental disorientation.

"E- excuse me?" With a shake of my head, the deftly-unraveling knot of crimson drawn in a taut seam along the small of my back rustling across my dress, I feign a virtually childish obliviousness, as though I'm unable to concentrate for greater than a few moments. "I... I think that the boat's horn might have deafened me a bit." The sheet of crimson warmth blazing across my cheek vaults to a flaming, infernal height, and I've the distinct sense that it would be perfectly delightful to dissolve into the craggy street beneath me.

"Oh, it's quite all right." My governess' reply is startlingly languid, accompanied by an unwaveringly gentle and understanding expression, even as her eyes alight with a mortifying amusement; she must believe I'm daft. "My name is Go Xi, but I understand that westerners reverse that; so, I ask that you call me Xi Go." That name is so familiar, as if I'm accustomed to speaking it at every moment of every day; an indescribable swell of emotions accompanies that: sorrow, yearning, and an unutterable ecstasy, winding together in a serpentine jumble that's exhausting with even the most momentary flicker.

"Ah..." My lips contort themselves in a pitiful imitation of her own, stunned by that overpowering emotion that continues to throb even as it recedes from my whirling thoughts, as I struggle to speak. "_Shego_." My pronunciation is absolutely execrable; my mouth barely manages to form the feeblest facsimile of that uniquely beautiful, pure tonality. It's a blind man struggling to reproduce a Repin; there's simply no hope, and my gaze falls away from her, fervently hoping that she'll simply be willing to tolerate me.

"That's very good, Kimberly." I haven't the slightest inkling of why this should devastate me so completely, but I'm upon the cusp of sobbing at those words; the aching tenderness manifest in her delicate, lilting voice, as if she's as overcome by that daze of emotion as I am.

"T-thank you, governess." Please, allow me to die at this very moment. A weighty, crippling silence ensues, as if time has paused purely to allow my inexplicable grief and humiliation to mount; my father finally shatters it with a wondrously, divertingly bombastic proclamation.

"Well, if introductions are over, let's go home. I've missed my girls, and I don't think burning daylight at some filthy pier is much of a substitute for making up for lost time." It's actually possible, with abundant struggle, to pry my tearing eyes away from the grimy concrete, seamed with spidering fissures that I'm briefly tempted to follow into their distant infinities across the horizon, and focus upon my father. I notice that his gaze flickers between my governess... Xi Go... And me, as if he can actually perceive a suggestion of that overbearing tension that's risen between us. "You and your governess can get to know each other, better, too, while we travel. You don't mind coming with us, do you, Miss Go?"

"Xi Go, please, Mister Vozmozhnym. And, no, I would be perfectly delighted. Your daughter is very sweet." Oh, god... Couldn't a seething arc of lightning emerge from this perfectly, cruelly cloudless sky and erase me from this worldly plane?

"Mister Vozmozhnym? No need for such formality, especially if I don't have to be stuffy and formal with you, Xi Go." A brief glance at my mother yields a spectacular narrowing of her ordinarily vibrant and expressive eyes, her slim hands clenching upon the sleek fabric of her dress. "I have to insist that you call me Dmitri, don't I?"

"If you insist." Xi Go seems vaguely evasive, offering him a perfectly polite smile that barely seeps into the startlingly dark pools that moments before seemed to gleam with a radiant exuberance.

"Well, shall we, my love?" Mother's grip slackens upon her clothing, claiming father's own outstretched hand; it spectacularly dwarfs hers, and her expression at once seems to revert to a perfectly, blissful serenity, as if every upset has dissolved with the all-encompassing warmth of his embrace. It's a curious sensation, and one that I've experienced with him; it's an almost implausibly complete security, as if his presence alone would deflect the lashing onslaught of a Maxim gun.

"Of course, Dima." Mother clings to father as a child would, turning for an almost imperceptible instant to Xi Go with a spiteful, venomous glare; she confronts merely that familiar, polite and unwavering smile in reply. It seems authentic solely with me, melting with an overflowing emotion that trickles into her sloe eyes.

"Kimberly?" Xi Go's voice startles me, though I'm somehow unable to turn to her as we trudge more ponderously behind my parents. Father, with the utmost, chivalrous patience, is gingerly aiding mother along the drooping step of one of the saloons; she finally vanishes into the murky darkness of its cabin. He follow shortly.

"Yes?" I wish that she wouldn't speak with me; that she wouldn't even acknowledge me. I can feel my heart thunder within my chest with such violence that I'm certain its unremitting, timpani roar is simply reverberating across the wharf. With every syllable from her, that sensation soars ever further, my mind reeling and my sight misting with an ever deepening, elusive sense of the total unreality of my own surroundings. It's as though her very presence and the delicate, dulcet tones of her speech are corroding some hopelessly fragile, gossamer curtain dividing this familiar life from another.

"I am very happy to be your governess. Your father tells me that you weren't fond of Missus Volkov." Somehow, the sheer novelty of confronting Natalya Federovna's despised surname manages to dispel a slight shred of that unnerving sensation; my lips are actually quirking with the vaguest suggestion of a smile.

"I... I suppose not." The startlingly deep, husky quality of my voice jars me into another fit of disorientation for a moment. "I, um... I'm glad that you're happy to be my governess." A pitiful and utterly noncommittal reply that renders me positively ecstatic to hear my father's voice roar from the saloon.

"Kimberly! Are you waiting for an invitation from the court?" The uncanny familiarity of that manages to jar me from this thrall of shuddering bewilderment; how often have I heard that?

"Yes, father." There's no prospect of his hearing me, but it's an immediate and intuitive reply. I've an odd, dualistic sense toward him. It seems as if every woman, especially my mother and me, can't help but feel an overpowering rapture in his presence; it's as if his attention is the purest ambrosia, the most complete, beatific joy and security, and you're the only human being alive to enjoy it... And, yet, there's an uncannily tenuous quality to that; a fear that it might simply evaporate, that one will somehow manage to be rejected from that Eden. Father is tempestuous, emotional; I've managed to avoid his rage, squalling and roaring with an unfathomable violence, but I've heard him once with mother when he was truly angry. I'm terrified of ever confronting that. Even Maria and Valentina have told me much the same.

Politely, however, even if it would gall my mother and her fixation upon status, I allow Xi Go ahead of me: she's my senior and my governess, and, above all else, it simply seems somehow proper. I'm greeted again with that sweetly encouraging smile that sends a momentous, swollen flush careering through my flesh, a simmering and indescribable electricity rippling along every nerve. Somehow, it seems reminiscent of those beautiful evenings with Ariadne at Smolniy, savoring the graceful slenderness of her fingers intertwining with mine; an undefinable, transcendental majesty that would flood through me as we lay in silence together, or exchanged quiet, meaningless words, our attention fixated upon one another's voices.

It's a similar, palpitating warmth as my eyes drift briefly along Xi Go's sleek, elegant curves; the delicate flare of her hips; the fine, swanlike splendor of her neck as she mounts the step with a deft, virtually acrobatic flourish, the majestic fullness of her raven locks spilling around her, luminously capturing the sun's caress; a brief, hitching intake of breath as my gaze falls upon the slender shapeliness of her legs, clasped in the shimmering grandeur of her stockings.

"Kimberly." She extends one hand to me, and I'm utterly stricken at its virtually impossible warmth as I claim it. For an ephemeral instant, I'm certain that her eyes flare with an improbable, lustrous green fire; it withers to mere embers the following second, and has vanished completely, merely the vaguest trace lingering upon my sight, when I blink. I'm awestruck by the sheer enormity of the motorcar, and the uncanny silence of the engine as the driver closes the door with a muted clatter; it's merely a mild, grumbling murmur, escalating to a shuddering growl as it jolts forward with a jarring acceleration.

I've been placed beside Xi Go, opposite my father; I notice my mother's distasteful expression whenever her eyes drift toward my governess, as if she abominates the very notion of being with her. My mother overflows with love and humanity, but I know of her thoughts toward those that she's been taught to believe are 'lower'; those that people the rungs of society bereft of the advantages of birth, class, status, and wealth; those whose foreign birth has deprived them of the blessing of European enlightenment.

"So, Xi Go," mother's eyes narrow as father begins to speak, "What's your thought of the Vozmozhnym clan?" The concept of obliquity has clearly never occurred to father, and it's one of his most adorable traits.

"I am honored to be in your employ, sir." That bland, effortlessly polite smile again; I notice father's eyebrows knit with a certain consternation at the formality, until it seems to occur to him that he merely instructed her not to address him as 'Mister Vozmozhnym'.

"Quite so." Silence is also uncomfortable for father. "Quite so. What about my lovely daughter? She's beautiful, isn't she? She takes after her mother, fortunately for her." A bellowing laughter that's definitely not suited to the claustrophobic confines of a motorcar.

"Indeed, sir." I confront a brief, sidelong glance from Xi Go, and I'm relieved that merely the vaguest trickle of the day's waning luminosity manages to seep through the narrow windows of the saloon as we drift beneath the vast, towering hulks of stone and glass that preside with an imperial majesty over the city. "It is an honor and a pleasure finally to meet your wife and your daughter. Your sons are also lively and vigorous; I am sure that they will make you proud in carrying on your name."

"And our daughter, too." Mother interjects with an icy intensity. "That is the reason for which Kimberly is being educated. I understand that modern women cannot be content to be taken care of all their lives; their obligations will be much greater as we advance." A beat. "Wouldn't you agree, Miss Go?" Obviously, she's no truck with informality.

"Yes, Miss Vozmozhnym." And Xi Go understands intuitively that my mother would never abide being addressed with her name by a mere servant.

"I know that things are different here in China, but we do not wish our daughter to be raised like a savage, you understand." I notice father's visage clouding ever so subtly with that; I feel much the same.

"Yes." That achingly patient smile, and a polite nod.

"I am a traditional woman; I know that. I have found it hard to adjust, but all of my time with the great and enlightened people of Russia and England alike has taught me that, even if a woman's place is serving her husband, she should not be ignorant in doing so. Industry and awareness are vitally important; one cannot be slack and indulgent. It's a crime to lie about in idleness and sloth like a primitive."

"Yes, Miss Vozmozhnym." Somehow, I've the sense that mother expects Xi Go to become upset, or to protest at her diatribe; there's nothing but an infinitely understanding agreement.

"Well, I... I'm glad that you understand my expectations."

"Your daughter, I assure you, will be the recipient of the finest education possible." Xi Go manages to bow while seated; it's an exceedingly steep and deferential inclination of the slim, willowy curves of her neck. "I have been educated by a German; he is a great scientist, and a supremely learned academician. I understand that he is amongst the most distinguished in Europe, and assuredly one of the finest scholars in China."

"Is that so? Would I know this fellow?" Father interjects, studying Xi Go with a singularly enraptured expression. While he is an entrepreneur, father is an extraordinarily avid amateur scientist; a number of his experiments had been sponsored by the court, in fact, and he holds the patents to several firearms.

"I do not suspect so. He is... Very eccentric; very insular. It is quite remarkable that I made his acquaintance."

"How fascinating."

"I understand that he has been living in China for a better part of his life."

"And, Xi Go, how did you make his acquaintance?" Mother's scowl darkens with every word exchanged between them. I'm astounded by the virtually manic, childish giddiness with which father converses with Xi Go, his eyes alighting even as mother's expression contorts with singular distaste.

"I... It is a very long and unfortunately uninteresting tale." I've the sense that, while the former may be true, the latter isn't. "I do not wish to bore you with anything so trivial."

"Well, if you insist, but-"

"Where are the boys, Dima?" Mother finally interrupts; her mouth has been working with a palpable agitation for the past several moments, but she behaves as if that thought had been a sudden and extraordinary epiphany.

"Hm?" Father's mind may be of a thundering, locomotive power, but it's certainly quite readily derailed. His expression transforms to a limitless, benign tenderness with her words, his gaze snapping to her.

"The boys, Dima. Where are they?"

"With Vasi, I expect. You know that young men can't be bored with tedious old folk. They crave adventure."

"And Maria and Valentina?"

"With them, too. You know they like to give us our distance."

"Yes, I suppose so." When mother and father are together, in any event. "Won't they be a bit crowded?"

"I expect the others'll wait for the luggage lorry. The service said that they were a bit overburdened, so it might be this evening."

"You mean, our luggage will be out at the wharf?" Mother is overtly nonplussed with that.

"Just until this evening. Don't worry, dear. Don't worry." Father's voice rises to a levitous coo, obviously seeking to soothe mother's increasingly worn nerves. I haven't the slightest inkling of why she's been so anxious since arriving; every moment since his departure has witnessed an ever-soaring, eternally mounting agitation, but, beyond that wondrous and ephemeral instant of relief upon that first, blissful glance, she's behaved as though scorned. The bitter, asp-like venom of the scowls she inflicts upon Xi Go is all the more bewildering.

"I... I understand. I'm sorry, darling; I fear that the voyage has exhausted me." Weeks of haranguing me to improve in English with her pedantic instruction assuredly have enervated me. In those final few moments, I had the sense of my own death.

"It's quite all right, my love; quite all right. I'm certain that a glorious meal awaits us at home."

"Is it like our home in Saint Petersburg, father?" The sudden, arctic silence that ensues shreds through the fragile, silken fabric of calm like a ragged cleaver.

"Kimberly..." A deep, irritable intake of breath, his features suddenly so intensely, frightfully drawn; it's as if he's aged a decade within the span of instants. I can feel every muscle tense, a tingling, electric fear sparking through me until Xi Go's convivial tone ruptures the gathering tension.

"Actually, Kimberly, your house is very interesting. It once belonged to a wealthy merchant; it's prided for its lush and beautiful gardens, even amongst the finest residences in the city."

"Truly?" Thank you, Xi Go.

"Oh, yes. I'm sure that it's nothing like your home in Russia, but it is wonderful in its own right."

"H-have you seen my room?" My eyes remain riveted upon Xi Go, as if the warmth of her gaze is an impregnable shield against my father's nightmare disapproval.

"Yes, I have. I made sure to inspect your quarters personally."

"A-and, are... Are they quite pleasant?"

"Yes." A beautifully tender smile, a few errant, sleek tendrils of her raven locks rustling with a languorous, almost living caress across her pale cheek. She brushes them aside with slim, gently tapered fingers, and my mind idly muses that they seem very much like Ariadne's; somehow, that unaccountably inflames me, and I'm forced to avert my eyes for a moment. "Very much so. Your bedchambers were once the young women's quarters; they overlook the gardens."

"Truly?" The women's quarters? That seems so profoundly medieval, and yet oddly familiar.

"That's correct, Kimberly." Father seems as relieved as I am at the diversion. Often, I've the sense that it was the loss of the ideal of Saint Petersburg as the dignified, patrician capitol of his image of Russia that has so wounded him; that the thought of anyone, particularly a communist or a socialist or an anarchist or the sundry other 'ists' that I'd heard elevated to divinity or decried as demons, occupying what was intended for royalty is a sacrilege beyond his toleration. Order and structure are matters of religious profundity for him; any thought of Saint Petersburg in its present incarnation tortures him. "I thought that home the most beautiful in all of Shanghai, so I selected it for us."

"That sounds lovely, father." It does; a departure from the stultifying banality of Paris would be magnificent. It was utter torture to suffer its miserable and altogether diseased, bleak Gallic sensibilities; so near to the wondrous, orderly majesty of Russian enlightenment, but bereft of that gloriously powerful spirit. It was torture to feel as if home were but minutes away, separated by an unbridgeable gap of vindictive men and their politics.

"It is Chinese?" Mother doesn't seem so ecstatic.

"Well, of course, dear. This is China." A certain tinge of amusement creeps into father's voice, though he immediately seems to regret any suggestion of it at mother's glower.

"I had thought that Europeans had brought civilization to this place."

"It is still China, dear. There's nothing the matter with that; it's beautiful."

"It's not civilized." A vaguely petulant protest, as if those stances are completely irreconcilable; that beauty simply cannot be in a void of European civilization.

"I... I suppose that you're right, dear." I don't believe that I've ever confronted such a sense of wry resignation from father. Ordinarily, he eagerly lunges to accommodate mother; I'm astonished by the almost palpable tension that's arisen between them, a molten curtain of rage in brief abeyance.

"Um... Uh... _Shego_." Again, I fail miserably to pronounce those elusive syllables.

"Yes, Kimberly?" Her smile widens, subtly but perceptibly, as she turns to me again from my mother.

"Where did you live before coming to Shanghai?" A lengthy moment of silence, as though the topic is absolutely, outrageously taboo.

"A great many places." Xi Go finally manages; even that seems to be a significant, wrenching struggle. "Too many to recount."

"A true nomad." My father interjects with a certain wistful sentimentality. He's a romantic attachment to truly archaic Russia; the clash of nomads and settled peoples and the extraordinary upheaval of the steppe. I've had quite enough of hearing of the exploits of Prince Vladimir, the campaigns against the Pecheneg, and the expansion of Kievan-Rus.

"I suppose that you could say that."

"Are you a Buddhist?" I've been inculcated with images of China as a nation of singular mysticism; the stupas and pagodas seem to embody that.

"Don't be impolite, Kimberly." Of course, mother would consider that an insult.

"No, no." A genial and muted laugh from Xi Go; I can't help but feel extraordinarily silly. "I'd never shave my hair."

"Huh?" I don't quite perceive the connection.

"A good Confucian daughter would never remove her hair." Xi Go explains with a curious wry humor, as if that's the sole consideration that would bar her from fleeing to a monastery.

"I... I see."

"You'll learn." She offers with a gentle, slightly tentative brush of her fingertips against my shoulder; an immediate, electric welter rips through me at that, and I barely manage to suppress the quiet whimper that threatens to escape my lips. It's such a simple touch, and yet I virtually felt my body dissolving, my mind reduced to a quivering incognizance.

"I'll- I'll be learning of China?" Somehow, in her presence, that instills me with an almost inarticulate rapture.

"I should hope not." Mother snaps. "I was under the impression that our daughter would be receiving a proper, European," she accentuates that with an unbelievable harsh intensity, "Education."

"And she will be." Father soothes. "But there's nothing the matter with learning history. Everyone's history."

"I don't-"

"There's no need to discuss it now." He interrupts, gesticulating toward the window beside mother. I've been completely ignoring our surroundings, alternatingly beholding Xi Go's exoticism with awkward, halting glances and struggling to understand the barrier that seems to have arisen between mother and father. "There- we're drawing near." And we seem to be. It may be the European Concession, but there's certainly no dearth of Chinese; they throng around us, rickshaws, palanquins, and bicycles, the bulk of them struggling with the burden of an unbelievable wealth of weighty packages or their equally encumbering white charges.

Their dress seems distressingly shabby: billowing tunics or vests and enormous, ragged trousers, seeming to blossom gruesomely around uncannily slender legs. They appear positively emaciated, bare feet or ragged shoes scraping along rugged and rending cobblestones or concrete. There are others, however, that seem nearer to Xi Go: women in beautiful, form-fitting dresses, adorned with a glorious and luminous array of floral patterns; men in costly European suits or finer renditions of the laborer's ratty wardrobes. The whole of the struggling, perspiring, groaning, and tormented men appear positively invisible to those others; if it weren't for the fact that the transparently wealthy and unencumbered maneuver around them with such effortless ease, I'd suspect that I alone could see them.

"Who are those people?" I finally ask, even as father seems to be in the midst of offering an exhaustive tour of the architecture.

"What people, Kimberly?" He seems rather perplexed.

"The... The workers, I suppose. There are so many of them." They resemble biblical depictions of slaves, or even the political paintings of serfs and downtrodden industrial laborers.

"Well, yes. They are workers, dear." Father lectures. "If it weren't for the Europeans employing them, they'd be desperately poor. We've brought much progress to the Chinese; all of this was once ruled by their own government, and they were miserable. Such filth and exploitation." I offer another glance to a gaggle of tiny, squat children in rags, who peer from the wilted shadows of an alley at the saloon as if it's a demon from the depths of darkest hell, belching flame with the curl of smoke filtering from its exhaust. I can see hate and desperation in their eyes, even as they sift through a drain, plucking forth ragged heaps of what I'm certain are noodles and tiny morsels of bread or buns.

"I... I see." A sidelong glance at Xi Go yields nothing; neither a confirmation nor an indignant denial. Perhaps they're invisible to her, too; or perhaps she doesn't wish to see them. I suppose it's not a foreign notion: the poor toiled across from Nevskiy Prospekt; they looked at us with eager and hungry eyes, and I was afraid. The poor churn occasionally from the slums of Paris; even Christ had said that the poor will always be with you. I simply never expected to see so many of them.

"China would be in a very poor position if it weren't for Europeans. They didn't even understand the merits of free and open trade, you see; they attacked our merchants. They were primitive." Father offers, but my eyes return to the dark alleys, in search of other children; I've occasional glimpses of similar urchins, or dismal, wraith-like figures, wretched concentrations of shadow that gaze forth with sinister, invisible gazes from the wilted black.

"Oh." I would never tell my parents, but I read the revolutionary pamphlets when they strewed the streets like December snow; the furious, polemical decrying of the indulgence of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, of the urgent need for the solidarity and brotherhood of workers against the suffocating hand of the powerful. They frightened me; I'm still frightened, and I feel unbelievably, achingly guilty.

"Isn't that right, Xi Go?" Father commands expectantly.

"Of course, sir." Another noncommittal murmur.

"You'd still be back in your village, I'd think, without any education. Some hypocrites and ingrates are getting around to whining about this supposed imperialism, but I say: What's wrong with it? We've brought marvels never before imagined by these huddled, poor masses. After all, had the Chinese even seen a motorcar before Europeans brought them? An aeroplane? A Maxim gun? I think not."

"That's true, sir." I've a vague inkling that her smile is widening, a subtle and wry tugging at her lips, as though she's simply humoring him; perhaps she's thinking what I am about the Maxim gun. I wish that Europeans had never seen it; I remember how Ariadne sobbed, fierce, wracking wails, throwing herself at me like a madwoman, when their family received that messenger from the Front. I recall, shamefully, being relieved that my father was a businessman, and that Timofei and Dmitri weren't even near to the age of service.

"Ah, here we are." The day has begun to recede into a sullen, wan twilight, the slanting, ocher rays of the sun evaporating in the midst of the dank, leaning shadows of the surrounding buildings. They're Chinese, unmistakably, and they are beautiful, squat yet curiously graceful amid even the soaring, slender spires of their European brethren. A few fine, nearly theatrical curls of mist weave with a languorous and serpentine grace about the stout stone gate, graven with elegant carvings and scrolling, intricate patterns that seem to coil and ripple like a dragon's scales. It occurs to me that the dominant buildings, arched roofs jutting above the gate, are engulfed within a single compound; that is our home.

Opposite is another, similar edifice, albeit pathetic, desolate and tumbledown; rusting, buckled iron sways despondently upon decrepit hinges, and dead, sullen eyes gaze upon the suddenly, startlingly vacant street. It's remarkably eerie, the image of vibrant, immaculate prosperity opposite a ramshackle, imploding vestige of obviously lustrous and beauteous grandeur.

"Whose home was that?" I ask, albeit a bit tentatively, half-expecting a further deepening of my father's irritation.

"That old pile? I have no idea; it's quite distasteful, however, whose-ever it had been." Father seems legitimately perplexed by that, as well. "Probably lovely once, though."

"It was burned." Xi Go's sudden, vaguely laconic remark startles me; I haven't heard her voice for several minutes, now, and I'd become accustomed to the curious and unearthly sense of silence in its void. Somehow, there seems to be no life without that; it's an unaccountable sensation of total stillness, a deathly seepage of light, life, and vibrancy from my surroundings. Even still, that bizarre, distant sense of memory continues to tease and tantalize my senses.

"Pardon?" Father seems as bewildered as I am.

"It was burned." She repeats. "One of the customs officials lived there."

"Oh." A beat. "Why was it, though?" Obviously, my father isn't quite as knowledgeable as he believes.

"He angered the army, so they burnt it." She explains, as if it's of truly intuitive simplicity. "He upset the Europeans, and wouldn't compromise; the army told him to surrender, to accept the new order, and he didn't. So, they came one evening and shot-"

"That's enough, I think." Father interrupts with an exaggerated exuberance. "I just remembered that I wanted to show you girls something absolutely glorious." A deliberate moment's pause. "I'm sorry, Xi Go, for interrupting."

"It wasn't important." I consider it important.

"What is it, dear, that you wanted to show us?" Mother doesn't appear perturbed in the slightest by that revelation; I can already feel a shiver of utter horror whenever my eyes migrate, inexorably and inescapably, toward that flame-blackened stone facade.

"You'll just need to see, my love." The saloon finally comes to a complete, secure halt before the entrance, the engine continuing its purring thrum as the low, distant clatter of an opening door and the shuffling tread of shoes across gravel culminates in a quiet rap upon steel; our own door sways open with the utmost grace and delicacy, and our driver, Chang curiously materializing beside him- again fixing Xi Go with a disdainful and vaguely uneasy expression- offers father a hand. He refuses it, perhaps predictably, extending his own to mother, who, with considerable difficulty, manages to negotiate the step to the stone-strewn street.

I follow, somehow managing to conjure the courage to aid Xi Go, who electrifies me with the tenderest of smiles, to the avenue before our home; the driver deftly, with a certain inordinate urgency at Chang's glower and a rapid stream of Chinese, boards again and streaks around the corner amid a belching mist of exhaust. Remarkably, within the dark, shadow-dappled confines of the lane, the fragrant blossoms studding the soaring limbs of ancient, gnarled trees swelling from the compounds rustling with a delicate breeze, silence prevails. I'd envisioned that the whole of the city, even our home, would be engulfed within the eternal, dissonant clamor of concentrated life; of innumerable lives, their toils, traumas, and triumphs, melding into a single thundering din rising to the heavens.

"Chang." My father acknowledges, finally. "I didn't see you come aboard. I thought you were with the boys."

"No, master." A stern shake of his head, followed by a scraping and deferential bow. "I received no direction from you, so I suspected that I would join you and... The women." As though we don't belong in a sentence with 'the master'. "Your other menservants seemed to provide ample protection. I am most sorely apologetic, master, if that is not what you wished."

"No, no. Vasilevich is an old salt, and that Tartar is as good as two or three regular men. I'm sure they'd be a match for you." Father vows, though I've the slightly unnerving sense that Chang isn't quite... Human; there's a perpetually coiling and uncoiling strength that ripples through his body, as though he's minutely in control of every muscle. Not a single breath seems to be squandered; every inch of his very being appears to be disciplined, subordinated to his unyieldingly rigid control. He could only be a monk.

"I am sure, master. Shall I help your family with anything?" Whether Chang believes that a one-legged sailor and a young man would be a rival for him, I haven't the slightest inkling, but nothing seems to bother him but Xi Go.

"No, thank you, Chang. Tell the chef to begin preparing our meal; it's getting late."

"Very good, master." And Chang... Vanishes. I'm certain that he simply strode with all due haste through the gate, but I didn't notice the subtlest suggestion of his footfalls upon the dusting of gravel and the tiny cobbles strewn about the avenue; there wasn't even the vaguest flicker of motion. I turned away for a moment, and, upon returning, he had evaporated.

"Is Chang a monk?" I can't restrain my curiosity, now, particularly as he's no longer in our midst.

"He was, he told me. Something about a temple out in the Songshan." A grin quirks Xi Go's lips at my father's remark, and I'm again entirely bewildered. It's as if everything surrounding her is a profoundly hilarious joke, though solely she can perceive the humor in it.

"Why is he here, now?"

"Do you remember Old Vlad, Kimberly?" I assuredly would; an elderly, eccentric relative with an affinity for vodka and no toleration for what he labeled, 'Damned old monks.'

"Yes."

"He was a _raskolnik_. In his youth." Old Vlad?

"What? Really?"

"I suppose you couldn't have known. Still, people change; and I don't think there's anything more stifling than a monastery. My parents tried to get me to go into the church, you know; I told them that even Saint Augustine wanted to live life as a man before devoting himself to god."

"Such sacrilege." Mother hisses, and even father seems rather chastened at that. Mother may have been reared as an Anglican, but she's the most furiously devoted Orthodox woman I've ever met; even nuns would probably be a bit insecure in her presence.

"Of course. I'm sorry, dear." Father murmurs; I've never seen any semblance of devotion from him, so I rather wonder what inspired her piety. "Shall we?" He's obviously eager to be away from that topic.

"Yes, please." With a flourish, as I ponder what extraordinarily blissful delight awaits us, father guides us through the gates, and beyond a hopelessly drab slab of concrete- adorned with merely a peculiar, angular character- that greets us through a brief awning; I halt at once, overcome by a jarring awareness of precisely the exotic paradise into which we've been guided.

Whatever mother's sentiments toward the Chinese, the garden that envelops us at once within its fragrant folds is the most glorious natural spectacle my eyes have ever beheld. Lush, luminous blossoms unfurl in a kaleidoscopic whirl of shades from the reaching russet limbs of diminutive, beauteously groomed trees; stunning hues of violet and vermillion, countless blooms sprouting in poetically sculpted chaos around the pale, limpid pool of a sublimely serene pond at the courtyard's center. Beneath the deepening, dappled shadows, it seems a pallid emerald, reflecting all the more intensely the verdant magnificence of the exotic orchards; I recognize bamboo, swaying with a languorous breeze seemingly conjured to accentuate the rippling splendor of every leaf; lotus and lilies sprout in baffling preponderance beside peonies and orchids. Even maples and cherry explode forth from the monumental concentrations of nature; but it doesn't run riot, instead restrained as if by its own organic will in impeccably elegant organization.

Seemingly random clusters of boulders and stones, I realize, are hardly arbitrary in their placement; they rupture otherwise linear lanes, skewing everything toward a gloriously deliberate disorder that inspires a yearning for nothing but to embrace the sublime serenity that I can feel flooding through me; it pools within my mind, a liquid clarity that joins the crisp fragrances streaming with a gentle power from the botanical splendor. A bridge, draped in subdued greens, carved and detailed in a manner similar to the ornate gate and walls, spans the lake, linking the porch of the central building, adorned with an enormous, crimson-tiled, steeply-slanted roof, with a rounded, steepled pagoda awash in wondrous, yet curiously sullen and shadowed, shades of nature. In the distance, the muted gurgle of a stream seems to issue from the deepest reaches of untainted nature, even as the city rages beyond this grotto of utter tranquility.

"Well, Kimberly?" I visualize that seasons have advanced as I beheld the incomparable perfection of the garden. Its innumerable sculptures, draped with verdant lushness as if tigers crouching in primeval jungles, seeming to embody for me the dark, elegant exoticism of the truly mystical; a certain, undefinably wild and untamed spirit that, as I glance away at last from the garden, I can see captured in Xi Go's willowy form.

"Yes, father?"

"What do you think of it?" He seems expectant, as though I'll simply offer him a thoughtless word of approval.

"I..." What can be said? Can words capture the essence of the ancient and unconquered splendor of gods long past? Can a simple sentence or sentiment describe the divine? "It's so wonderful; it's sublime."

"It's a scholar's garden." I pivot again to Xi Go, who seems somehow to be designed for this supernatural splendor; she appears virtually invisible, as though she unconsciously fades into the dark grandeur of the leaves and blossoms. It seems to command a deliberate effort from her to return to my sight, a delicate smile upon her lips as she explains. "This is one of the most beautiful I've seen."

"A scholar's garden?" This is the residence of a scholar?

"Every Chinese man should be a dutiful scholar," she explains, lifting her hands in a broad, sweeping gesture that seems to channel the rawest essence of the garden; it dips to utter silence before soaring to an almost deafening, magical howl of purest, untamed power. My parents don't seem to notice, but I feel as if I'm before a roaring lion; but there's no sense of fear, no pain, not anything but a bewildering clash of comfort and exhilaration. "There's enlightenment to be found in everything, and the garden is where a scholar can discover the serenity to explore it."

"Isn't it beautiful, dear?" My father's voice ruptures the spell, or Xi Go allows it to fade; everything has returned to its ordinary beauty, but it's abruptly so excruciatingly... Tame. I'm yearning for her to perform that incantation again, to return everything to its fullest strength.

"Yes." I'm amazed at how indifferent mother seems, as though this is but a common French garden at the Tauride. It's as if she simply doesn't register what surrounds us. My eyes drift to the central pagoda; they narrow subtly to peer through the darkness cloaking what lies in its center, but I'm unable to pierce the blackness that appears to grow as I focus further and further.

"This is all ours. I'm so happy that you and Kimberly like it." Father is as disappointed as I am with mother's reaction, but I've begun to expect this from her; everything of China appears to be deliberately scorned. She seems to prepare herself to be underwhelmed by everything imaginable, and it frustrates me horridly.

"Where is our room, Dima?" Mother turns away, and I find myself drifting toward Xi Go, despite this disorienting, whipping swell of emotion that's hardly been placed in abeyance by the newfound garden.

"My room overlooks the garden?" My voice dips to a gentle whisper.

"Yes, Kimberly." A patient nod.

"It's beautiful. But, um..." My mind reels with the sense that she'll believe me a perfect idiot if I voice the thought that's gnawing relentlessly at me.

"Yes?"

"Nothing." A beat. "What's inside of the pagoda?"

"I don't know." As though that's explanation.

"H-haven't you ever looked into it?"

"No." Xi Go seems fixated upon maddeningly terse phrases; they're direct, unambiguous, but oddly cryptic, as though she's telling me a sort of truth that doesn't begin to capture the more complex tones and nuances of reality. "I'm sorry- I haven't been here long. Your father has prepared a room for me, however, and I'm sure that we'll have ample time to explore the garden."

"I'm so glad." An abrupt, giddy rush of delight that sends another blazing flush into my cheeks. At this rate, I'm concerned that I'll simply be stained vermillion.

"You like the garden that much, Kimberly?" I'm amazed at how beautifully she pronounces my name; it's not quite correct- not my mother's pronunciation, in any event-, but her lips caress it as though a magical spell. Whenever I hear it, I certainly feel as if I'm in the thrall of a sorceress' incantation.

"I... I haven't ever seen anything like it, _Shego_." Why? Why can't I ever manage that name? It's as if it's deliberately eluding me. "There aren't gardens like that in Russia. Or in France."

"I would imagine not." She replies with such intense certainty. "There are things here that cannot exist elsewhere, in places where old ways have given way to the modern." Xi Go doesn't say it, but I can feel a sense that she's not referring to the scientific or academic; that there is magic here that man has yet to dispel with his disbelief.

"Oh. I'm- I'm glad that we've come here." I truly am. My fears, my anxieties, my irritations... They seem to have dissolved in the midst of this splendor. Perhaps I'd feared that China would merely be another France; that it would be a hopelessly brittle reflection of the familiar from Russia, that the spectral traces of comfort would simply shatter whenever I sought to live them. Perhaps I'm glad that Xi Go is my governess.

"Kimberly? Is something amusing?" She's peering expectantly at me, and I realize that I'm brandishing the most hopelessly ridiculous smile in the history of the human race. I barely even understand why, but it intensifies when she offers me her own, eyes alighting beautifully.

"Nothing at all." My brain seems to be dissolving, but I'm perfectly fine.

"Well, then, shall we join your parents?" We're alone? My gaze flickers about the garden, and I notice that they've vanished.

"W-we're alone?"

"Your father thought that you might like time alone with me." I would, actually, but I haven't the slightest inkling of what I would actually say to her.

"I... I suppose so. This is all so much, _Shego_." My hands are tensing at my sides, and I notice her sight drift briefly toward them.

"Is anything bothering you, Kimberly?"

"I feel awfully silly, honestly." And the sense of tranquility evaporates into the ether as her eyes, delicate, limpid almond pools, focus wholly upon my own; my breath hitches in my chest, and I've the distinct sense of drowning. It's oddly rapturous.

"Why?" Her fingers, slender and fine, settle delicately upon my shoulder; another electric jolt, the caress of skin upon skin, ripples through me, and I barely manage to stifle a gasp.

"I- I..." Why do I? "I can barely pronounce your name."

"Pardon?"

"I- I just say '_Shego_'. It sounds nothing like when you or my father say it."

"It's very sweet, Kimberly." That beauteous, dulcet sentence simply further deepens my frustration.

"You can pronounce mine."

"You'll learn, in time; I'll teach you anything that you want." Those glorious eyes briefly flare with a wondrous promise. "Anything at all. And I think it's perfectly wonderful. _Shego_." Her voice dips to a contemplative murmur, as if she's weighing my own wretched pronunciation against the proper one. "I rather like that." A beat. "Is that more Russian?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I think it's wonderful. Maybe I'll ask everyone to call me that." It's probably not intended to humiliate me further, but that infinite, tender kindness is almost impossibly cruel.

"I'll... I'll try to learn your real name."

"I'll teach you." Xi Go's hand drifts from my skin, and it's as if my connection with the transcendent has been severed again. I stand there, still and thoughtless, my body sudden robbed of sensation, before her voice snaps me from my daze. "Kimberly? Are you coming?"

"Oh, yes." Somehow, as blissful as the garden is, the notion of being abandoned amid its feral darkness terrifies me, particularly as the sun inexorably wanes from the sky, its shadows lengthening and deepening into an unearthly blackness. I'm at Xi Go's heels in an instant, demurely padding behind her toward a door overhung by an immense, angled roof; it blazes with an almost lurid intensity, the deep scarlet capturing the dusky sunlight with a violent, sanguine severity. Blood would appear to drip and trickle from its shingles, flawlessly interwoven; I hurry beneath it, overcome by the startlingly severe, cooling chill that pervades the porch.

I'm conducted through a squared doorway, a sullen darkness, disrupted solely by the dancing flares boiling from unseen lamps, overtaking me at once; my eyes adjust swiftly, however, affording me a glimpse of the towering rafters, steep and interlinked, that soar overhead. Everything is of an extraordinarily dark, yet glimmeringly warm, rich wood; it encircles us, paneling gracefully inlaid at periodic intervals with an array of unfamiliar and extraordinarily stylized characters. Turning, I discover that the dense latticework glimpsed without actually pierces the structure; minute shafts of dusk and wondrously tranquil trickles of breeze seep through them.

"This entire home is arranged north-to-south." Xi Go explains, gesturing about the enormous foyer. A staircase, severe and slanted, reaches along one of the walls; broad openings before us and to the left and right suggest a connection to the collection of other structures within the compound. "The complex, in fact."

"Why?"

"It's auspicious." She gestures to the engravings upon the wall. "As are these. This character means 'ten-thousand.'"

"You can read it?" The quiet giggle that idiotic question elicits further heightens my sense of total obliviousness.

"Yes, I can, Kimberly."

"O-of course you can. That was rather ridiculous, wasn't it?"

"No." A vaguely wistful shake of her head. "Most women, even today, can't read; in the villages, especially. They can't read the men's characters, anyway."

"I- I don't understand." I know that peasants are illiterate, even in Russia; but for nearly every woman to be?

"You will." A contemplative moment of silence. "Most everything here is different, Kimberly. And, you read something that I cannot."

"What is that?" That seems somehow intensely unlikely to me.

"Russian. I've seen the works that you father reads; it's all gibberish to me."

"Oh." And I was beginning to hope that she might also speak Russian. Still, it's a peculiar relief to discover something that she doesn't know.

"Perhaps you'll teach me."

"I'd like that." I would; enormously so. Anything, somehow, to be nearer to her; to have an opportunity to demonstrate that I'm anything but the ridiculously unworldly girl that I obviously am.

"Kimberly!" Father thunders into the foyer, slightly breathlessly. "You're still here?"

"S-_Shego_ was just showing me the hall. Did you know that the engraving means ten-thousand?"

"Have you seen your brothers?" Apparently, the novelty isn't as intense for him.

"No, I haven't, father." A return to insignificance, it would seem.

"Odd. Well, perhaps Vasi and the others have been held up. I'll have to give that man a stern talking-to once he gets back, that's for certain."

"Your daughter is very inquisitive, sir." Xi Go's lovely, lilting tones manage to somehow manage to fill the whole of the chamber without the subtlest echo, as if a ghost's whisper into my ears.

"Is that so? Very good, I would think." He notices her immediately, turning at once to confront Xi Go with a focused stare. "Are you ready for your instruction, Kimberly?" His gaze never leaves her; it's as if I'm truly invisible in her presence.

"Yes, papa."

"Very good. Very good." A firm nod, and a thoughtful smile parts his lips beneath his bristling mustache. "And are you finding your quarters to your satisfaction, Xi Go?"

"Yes, sir; very much. I am most honored to have a room of my own in the family wing."

"What do you mean?" My attention flickers to her again. I'm amazed by how her expression freezes like the Neva in January in the presence of my parents, particularly my father, as if every trace of true liveliness dissolves at their words. There's merely that perennial, polite smile.

"Ordinarily, one would be placed within the servant's quarters."

"But, you are a scholar, are you not, Xi Go?" Father voices my thoughts.

"If you say, sir." Another vacuous smile. "I am elated to be of service."

"Quite so. So, are you ready for dinner, Kimberly?"

"Is it ready?" So swiftly?

"Well, not yet. Soon, I'm sure."

"What... What do Chinese people eat, anyway?" Another hopelessly ignorant query, but it's not as if it's precisely been instrumental in my studies of the great empires of Europe and the past.

"A great deal. I think that you'll be quite pleased, Kimberly; it's very delicate, very lovely."

"Bit of a challenge to eat with those sticks. I don't think Russian hands are made for it, myself. Your mother might be beside herself to learn about that." Father muses with a dark welter of laughter.

"Sticks?" I've an image of skewering my meal with spears.

"_Kuae Tsy_." As if I've ever any hope of pronouncing that again. "They're not very difficult if you're willing to learn."

"Will you teach me?" I'm enthusiastic about learning anything from her, particularly something that exotic.

"Of course." Another gracious smile, and level, deliberate nod.

"Will you show Kimberly to her room, Xi Go? Her mother and I are a bit preoccupied with something." Father seems uncannily irritated; as I turn to him, he averts his gaze from me for a moment, before returning with his characteristic intensity.

"What are you doing, father?"

"Oh, never you mind, Kimberly. Your mother and I have just been apart for much, much too long. We have a great deal to discuss."

"I- I see. Will you be eating with us, though?" Mother and father tend to miss meals with such reunions.

"I'm sorry, Kimberly. Your mother and I need time alone. We have much to talk about, haven't we? We've been apart for a year; I would scarcely have recognized you if you hadn't grown to be as beautiful as your mother."

"Thank you, papa." I find myself murmuring for lack of anything to say.

"Well, I'll be going for the moment. Take good care of Kimberly, won't you, Xi Go?" And he vanishes through the portal to the right, abandoning us again.

"Of course, sir." A steep and dutiful bow to his retreating form, though I notice that the smile evaporates wholly from her full lips until she returns to me. "Kimberly?"

"Yes?" I'm presently transfixed by the arctic neutrality upon her upon her tautly-drawn features; she's barely recognizable. Xi Go is oddly ferocious, as if scholarship is the least of her talents.

"Are you ready to see your chambers?" And that smile returns, as if it had never faltered in the slightest. My timid nod seems to suffice for a reply, and she turns crisply upon the soaring, elegant peaks of her heels, effortlessly, with startling silence, traipsing toward the left portal.

"W-where are they?" I'm accustomed to my room being upon the second floor, and yet she rather pointedly ignores the staircase within this hall.

"In the children's wing, of course." A languid and slightly laconic response; I've the sense that I've again proudly brandished my hopeless ignorance.

"The children's wing?" I haven't been confronted with that since probably seven years of age.

"Children cannot be with their parents." Stated, again, as a transparent and self-evident fact.

"I don't understand."

"A child's place is not with their parents; particularly not a girl. One must remain aloof from one's parents; one must act with eternal deference and respect. It is not uncommon to be separated from one's elders; it is not their obligation to offer the comfort to which I understand western children are accustomed." Somehow, I hope that, as she speaks, there will arise even the subtlest trace of regret or sorrow; but there's no suggestion of that, as if Xi Go cannot conceive of anything but the living practice of those values.

"That..." That sounds so hopelessly cold and vacant. "That seems sad." I finally conclude, pathetically.

"It has its own benefits." A perfectly congenial smile that, for the first moment since our meeting, refuses to trickle into her eyes. "Come; let us see your quarters. They are beautiful; the family that once owned this was one of the most powerful and prosperous in Shanghai."

"Truly?" I'm accustomed to expansive, grandiose palaces in Russia; the compound itself is appreciably more diminutive than our home's grounds. Well, what was our home.

"Oh, yes. Did you not see that this complex is most unusual?"

"I don't understand." And I don't. A subtle shiver flits through me as we ease through one of the broad portals, ringed with a band of scaled engravings in lustrous, lacquered scarlet, to our left. I realize that there's actually no connecting corridor; it's simply a roofed passageway, its flanks exposed to a yawning, paved courtyard to the east, the wall visible beyond it and a parallel avenue, and the garden to the west.

"Ordinarily, most families have only one courtyard; even those with two arrange them more conventionally. The merchant that constructed this home was so wealthy that he discarded those precepts; he thought that even the will of heaven, which pervades all things, was less significant than his tranquility. So he purchased a pair of plots, which is inauspicious in and of itself, and indulged himself with a vast garden in one of them; it sprawls to the west along an amazing distance."

"How do you know this?" I finally ask, though my attention remains fixated upon the glorious garden that unfurls to the west. I realize that it is impenetrable; the western wall is actually invisible through the virtual forest that's sprouted within the compound.

"I have learned many things here." Another cryptic half-answer. "My mentor has taught me a great deal, as well." There's no fondness as she speaks of him; a brief glance at Xi Go confirms that, her lips drawn into a taut, straining scowl.

"What is that pagoda?"

"That is a shrine, Kimberly. A ceremonial site." I've the sense that she's becoming impatient with my ceaseless, rattling inquiry.

"For whom?"

"For the gods." I start at that. I'm so accustomed to hearing of god as the true god, the one god, the singular, omnipotent father of the divine, that the casual reference to so many- as if they're merely one's mystical neighbors- seems so peculiar.

"T-the gods?"

"Gods pervade everything; one cannot live without seeing them, without feeling their presence. They are much like men; they are immortal, and powerful, but even they are within the grip of reality. They can be invoked; they can be beckoned and reasoned with. They can even be bound."

"I thought that Chinese were Buddhists." That's essentially all that I've ever heard.

"Not all." A pensive moment. "And, even then..."

"I probably sound ignorant, don't I? I come from a place where there's only one god, and the thought of... Of calling upon god, or binding him... Well, it's impossible."

"Do you know what the difference between magic and your god is, Kimberly?" I've the sense that I'm upon the verge of learning. I hadn't expected that our lesson would begin so soon.

"I... I don't know. The fathers say that magic is evil, that it's sinful. Only faith can shield you from temptation." Temptation from what, I've never quite understood, and no one's ever explained.

"Magic is powerful." There's no judgment; neither derision nor adulation. "Magic is power without submission. It's calling upon the power of others, of all things; it's subordinating all to you, rather than submitting. It's understanding the order of life and the divine, and manipulating it, bending it to your will." She speaks this as if it's not simply some odd, abstract theory of metaphysics or theology; not even the ravings of madmen who claim to be alchemists or magicians in Russia are lined with such a serene sense of confidence and truth. It's as if she's a practitioner of magic herself.

"Are... Are you a witch?" If only she were; at the very least, she could indulge my wish to vanish, to be cast away anywhere but here as the lovely, lilting and musical strains of her laughter caress my ears, invoked with such cruel suddenness at my words.

"A witch? What an unusual question, Kimberly." She must think that I'm a superstitious simpleton.

"I- I'm sorry. That was so foolish of me, and-" And I'm about to cry, to burst into tears and begin sobbing into my palms at the thought of humiliating myself again. Everything is so unfamiliar, and the darkness seems to be magnifying in the presence of those plants, in the shadow of that towering pagoda at the center of the garden; it's as if twilight and dawn are melding, an eternal half-light that instills everything with a sullen cast of nearly liquid magic. It's frightening and exhilarating, and completely beyond anything I've ever confronted.

"No, don't apologize." Xi Go interrupts. "There's no need to be embarrassed. Please." My shoulders are trembling with suppressed sobs as her palm finds itself to my bare flesh again; my eyes jolt open, and it's as if every semblance of sorrow and agony has evaporated. I can't quite even recall for what reason I was so upset; in an instant, I can't even remember being upset. "Shall we see your room?"

"Yes." I agree without hesitation as we arrive at another annex; it's virtually identical to the other, save for the fact that the emblems graven into the stone aren't what I recall as ten-thousand. "What does that mean?"

"Obedience and filial piety." A slightly ironic murmur. Obviously, the merchant who constructed the compound had rather specific expectations of his children.

"I understand that."

"I suppose that you would."

"Have you ever visited Russia, _Shego_?" It's embarrassing, but I'll simply be forced to accept that my clumsy lips can never quite attain that beauteous perfection.

"No, I'm afraid not." A beat. "Well, not the Russia from which you come... You have other cities nearer to this one; your Ruler of the East, I understand. I once visited it with my mentor."

"Oh, Vladivostok." It's so far from Saint Petersburg that it's difficult to reconcile it with Russia. Then again, Saint Petersburg isn't even Saint Petersburg any longer. "I've never seen that; it's as if it's on another planet."

"It's very unusual." A quirking smile. "Very cold." It's astonishing how dissimilar the children's wing is, however, beyond the familiar facade. Rather than a vast, yawning hall, effectively featureless save for its ornate paneling and engraving, what awaits me is simply bewilderingly lush. Rather than the tiered rafters overhead, and the stark and austere, albeit beautifully lacquered, columns of wood supporting the sweeping roof, I greet a partial wall in lustrous, shimmering crimson, a perforated screen set above that spanning its complete length between two other sleek masonry barriers; slender gaps divide those, gently rustling curtains in cinnabar insulating each chamber from the other. I notice that another room, and an exit from this wing, lie beyond the screen.

This entrance bears an assortment of elevated, cushioned beds and what seems an improbably massive table at its center; otherwise, it's remarkably barren, and yet nevertheless host to almost indescribably beautiful, elegant vases, pots, and slender stone and glass figures distributed with a virtually poetic sense of the aesthetic. A vibrant illustration, in that now-familiar Asiatic fashion of an unearthly quasi-realism, of a mountain swelling from the fertile plains and jutting through a wreath of supernaturally dense mist, is set upon one wall. A chest, laden with curious and seemingly archaic scrolls inset within slim circular indents, lies beneath it.

"This is the children's wing?" I'd expected a nursery from the term.

"Many generations will live here, Kimberly, but the children will always remain children until their father's death." That seems a peculiar phrasing, but I remain silent as she continues. "Many generations can live within a single walled compound; the lodgings are vast. This home, however, is unusual for the area devoted to the garden; most families would wish to construct another set of buildings in such palatial grounds."

"I'm glad that there's the garden." I affirm. We're not a vast collection of Vozmozhnym; there aren't tens or hundreds of us to inhabit a palace. Even now, it feels somehow desolate, sepulchral; nearly a necropolis.

"As am I." Xi Go guides me to the left curtain, and I discover a staircase beyond it, along with another chamber of equal splendor; it's remarkable that everything seems so tastefully similar, and yet varies with vibrant idiosyncrasy, as though nothing has changed since the age in which it hosted so very many inhabitants.

"Do you come from a large family?" It seems such a benign question; I should probably refrain from any, it occurs to me, as I notice her shoulders stiffen for a moment.

"Yes." A perfectly measured, neutral reply, of the sort that she blandly offers my parents. I probably shouldn't even speak.

"I... I love my brothers, I think, though they're very noisy and bothersome."

"You are fortunate, then. Families, quite often, are very different from your own in my land." I vow to remain silent as I ascend the gently-curling staircase behind her; it's not of the stark, utilitarian quality of the main hall's, but narrower, finer, as if engineered with a woman's grace rather than a man's sense of purpose. We emerge into an antechamber, and it occurs to me that the staircase has actually wound nearer to the center of the building; a solid wall greets me as I rise into a sudden swelling of light, as though we've soared to a mountainous peak in that brief span of time.

It filters from nowhere, and yet is oddly universal; a dusky, molten gleam that inspires a sudden, hitching yawn. The upper level is very similar to the lower; a virtually identical bed, or perhaps it's a sofa, and a towering table that seems of remarkably limited utility. There is, however, a constellation of low, squat cushions arrayed around what I assume to be the bed; a stout trunk of some extraordinarily beautiful, archaic wood, lovingly preserved, rests beside it, as well, banded with luminous sheets of gold and lacquered to utter perfection.

"This is so wonderful." Even that can't upset her, I would hope.

"I am so very glad, Kimberly." Xi Go gestures to a portal to my left; a more solid door confronts me, inlaid with an incomparably, impossibly complex scrollwork. Human hands would seem to fail at such a uniquely involved and singularly elaborate task; dragons and chrysanthemum are patterned at regular intervals, and yet appear to dance and intertwine. The work is of such sublime elegance that it appears alive, as though the artisan succeeded in imprisoning life itself within the wondrously varnished wood; it glimmers with a dark luster, and I earnestly wonder if it is enchanted.

"Is- is this my room?" I gesture toward the door, though I haven't the slightest inkling of what lies beyond the portal.

"Indeed." Xi Go takes no action to open it for me.

"I-"

"It would be most inappropriate and forward of me to open this door, Kimberly. These are your private chambers."

"Oh." I finally do, taking hold of a slick lever that I realize must actually be solid silver; a momentous garnet lies at the center of its pivot, curiously reflecting and distorting the murky luminosity creeping by means unseen into the room. It sways open fluidly upon flawless hinges, silently and gracefully, and I'm greeted with truly extraordinary beauty.

Immediately, I'm confronted with an unfathomably delicate, brittle latticework, the swollen, crimson incandescence of the setting western sun clashing with the cool and verdant serenity of the garden, the pinnacles of its trees soaring into the heavens even at the level of the intricately perforated screen. Allowing my eyes to unfocus, I discover that the seemingly arbitrary pattern of crazily drifting seams across the silkily-lacquered wood, crimson capturing the sun's dying light, forms incomprehensible characters; an enormous circular void lies at its center, and hinges flank the solid wood beneath it, as though a miniature door. Strung around the expansive window bank is a tautly-bound bundle of curtains, obviously ornamented with elegant and colorful flowers despite the curling distortion of their present contortion. Opposite that is a bewilderingly immense bed, elevated to a remarkable extent from the floor; curtains also drape in graceful arcs, illustrated with cherry blossoms, from the soaring posts descending from the ceiling that appear to anchor it to the floor.

Another momentous table lies at the chamber's center, and the walls, rimmed with scarlet but of the purest bleached ivory at the core, are adorned with an impressive wealth of scrolls that would seem disappointingly ordinary if it weren't for the staggeringly elegant sweep of calligraphic brushwork across them, spelling words that are typically incomprehensible to me. Above the bed is a painting similar to that elsewhere, but of a beauty that dwarfs its counterpart; the colors are more intense, the figures rendered with a livid passion, the mountain more vibrantly real as it seems to lunge from the otherworldly, heavenly realm the paint portrays. The soaring peak, moreover, doesn't vanish with the opaque mist; a glorious, gilded splendor of a luminous sun swells above it, a host of beings of transcendental majesty and glory vaguely suggested around that gleam.

Several chests, of a graceful contour and inlaid with unobtrusive but stunning streaks of gold, silver, and platinum; another low table; and an array of fine, sleekly-varnished hardwood chairs and visibly pliant mats and cushions fan in a curiously symmetrical hemisphere from the bed, as if it's the centerpiece of the room itself. It feels rather akin to a throne room, the bed itself the platform from which an empress would dictate to her piteously grovelling servants and subjects.

"This is your room, Kimberly." I'm overcome with the rather vainglorious sense that I am a princess, though it doesn't bar me from a peculiar, scraping deference to my governess.

"I- it is? It's so beautiful." I could never have envisioned anything so elegantly, exotically glorious in Russia or Paris. Even our mansion was but of utterly European ordinariness, despite its pseudo-foreign flairs. Our 'Chinese room' was hardly of such splendor; the fragile Oriental garden, but a colorless cluster of struggling blossoms, was a feeble wretch by contrast with that verdant perfection which lies beyond my window.

"It is. It's a chamber truly suited to a princess." My lips part with a beatific smile of utter rapture at that confirmation of my own unspoken yearnings. I'd always envied the _Tsarevna_; not even necessarily for the obviously unrivaled wealth, power, and influence of the family, but simply for that odd and seemingly capricious recognition of being the princess. It was never a matter of influence, but rather the immediate deference accorded- with almost exaggeratedly tender chivalry- to such a figure.

As I turn to Xi Go again, who stands at the portal, my smile widens; for even the briefest of instants, she's my lady-in-waiting, appearing to be patiently awaiting my indulgence of her entry. "Will you join me, _Shego_?"

"Of course, Princess." That childish rapture becomes a reeling sense of faintness, as though I'll collapse into a swoon at any instant with that single, seemingly trivial word. She brandishes an exaggeratedly obsequious smile, as if she's also eager to play the role as a faithful member of the royal entourage.

"Where is your room?" I suddenly ask, wondering if it could ever begin to approach this magnificence. Somehow, I suspect that this is simply ordinary for the household, though it doesn't diminish my exuberance.

"On the lower floor, Princess." A graceful sweep of her slender fingers toward whatever lies beneath the interwoven panels of flawless hardwood.

"You... You shouldn't call me that." Or I'll truly collapse, Xi Go. My smile becomes ever more hopelessly bashful with each instant, and I ease toward the bed, settling onto what I discover to be a remarkably firm but curiously comfortable surface. "It doesn't feel like the beds in Europe."

"It's not." I can barely contain my disappointment at the disappearance of 'princess'. Another yawn erupts from the depths of my chest, and I clamp a palm with a swelling embarrassment upon my lips. "You seem weary."

"I... I suppose that I am." The smoldering caress of the sun's fading embers and the sheer exhaustion of travel seem to be robbing my body of what little strength it bears; the bed beckons to me.

"Would you care to take your meal here, Kimberly?" I couldn't possibly conjure the courage to insist upon 'princess', regardless of how playful it seemed to be.

"I- I could?"

"Families do not often dine together; it's not an obligation."

"Maybe. Father said that he and mother would be preoccupied, didn't they? I... perhaps I'd just like to rest."

"Very well, Kimberly." Xi Go takes her leave swiftly, without a further word, as if she understands my haste to sleep; the door latches gently closed behind her.

Not even undressing, I unfasten my shoes, setting them upon an upraised wooden step beside the mattress before curling onto the dense heap of wondrously supple, quietly rustling silk sheets. Drawing one atop me, I can feel the overbearing, nearly stifling caress of the day's lingering heat begin to strip away what remains of my strength. As my body and weary mind finally surrender to the creeping advance of slumber, my few, bleary thoughts are of a wistful longing for Ariadne's slender fingers intertwined with mine. Xi Go's face, and the tingling electric magnificence of her caress, seem to meld with Ariadne's own.


	3. Lesson

Awakening is an extraordinarily gentle affair, merely the subtlest suggestion of the otherwise blazing, overbearing enormity of the morning sun creeping with a serpentine, liquid grace into the limpid shadow of the garden. The diffuse light, a silken and tenderly luminous presence, brushes along my cheeks, warming my face as it trickles through the brittle latticework opposite the peculiar mattress upon which I'm curled with an almost exaggeratedly regal indolence. My eyes, at long last, begin to flutter open; full lashes perceptibly flitting upon my skin, my lips parting in a curious smile that I've discovered lingers upon them even as the blissful delight of rest drains away from my mind.

It's an oddly euphoric delirium, as if I'm not precisely anchored to this reality, and yet can delight in its innumerable sensuous splendors. That there isn't a clock within my chambers- well, there is, but it's long since vanished into the oblivion of one of the sundry, gorgeously carved chests-; merely the visceral rhythms of nature suggest the time to me, as do the quiet grunts and pants of exertion from beneath my balcony. I was astonished to awaken that first morning to that, my eyes instantly flaring open with the unusual glimmer flaring across the horizon; despite the protracted ordeal of our travel, I'd nevertheless expected the familiar, stark glare of the sun pouring in a scouring torrent through the expansive bay windows of my bedchambers in Paris. Stumbling to the window lattice, virtually collapsing in a groaning daze through its intricately carved splendor, I discovered Xi Go, clad in a most peculiar, billowing white costume, immersed in what seemed the most sublimely intricate and deliberate dance I'd ever witnessed.

It was oddly sensual, hands angled with a deliberate rigidness, every motion of her slim and willowy form beauteously controlled with seemingly the force of will alone; it was as if witnessing the rippling, graceful sway of a mountain. Every movement seemed unaccountable, perhaps impossible; even unblinking, it was as if she would transition without a single perceptible gesture from one position to another, simply transforming at once. Her leg would suddenly jolt forth; her hands recoiling away, or lunging toward an invisible partner. As I stood transfixed, my palms clasped upon the cool, craggy stone of the balcony, I discovered that it grew swifter and swifter; that initial, impossible alacrity was simply the ponderous drift of ages as the dance whirled to ever more bewildering heights of grace and agility, her entire body a blur until it, at once, without preamble, halted; it was as if she'd been still throughout the whole of that span, even with the hastening rise and fall of her chest beneath the pristine, bleached-bone fabric of her clothing.

Whether she noticed me or not, I retreated the instant that it appeared as if she'd finished; my face was scarlet with a peculiar shame, as if I'd been intruding upon some singularly intimate moment for my own indulgent curiosity. I could feel my entire body quiver with a peculiar electric delight, my heart a near frenzy as it thundered unremittingly, ever more powerfully, within my breast. A molten heat coursed through me, seeming to pool within my stomach and beneath with the sight of her slender, graceful limbs in such wondrously elegant motion; at the periodic cock of her hips; the glorious, lustrous immensity of her raven locks whirling and flitting with a playful energy around her body; the remarkably full swell of her chest, a subtle, creamy suggestion of her impossibly pallid skin bared as the garment parted with a particularly extravagant flourish of motion.

I've begun to greet the morning with an almost unutterable delight since then, peering with that guilty, giddy rapture upon that curious regimen from my balcony. It's a harmless indulgence, however certain I am that my mind will simply dissolve as that glorious pattern rises to its familiar apex; my knees quake, my fingers, damp with a flushing perspiration, barely maintaining their trembling grasp upon the slick stone as I gaze upon the unfolding magnificence of her dance. My limbs tingle with a peculiar levity when I admire her, as if I'm yearning to be beside her; I can virtually feel the curious rhythm and flow of her motions, and I've begun to understand them more intensely.

My eyes can actually discern the deft, gliding arcs of her arms and legs; it's no longer as though she's simply lurching from one pose to another, but it's nevertheless so bewilderingly deft that I'd be a thoroughly pathetic partner. I'm particularly astounded by the moments in which, even beneath the gilded corona of the sun's swelling caress, she appears to be bathed in an unaccountable shadow; a pulsating energy that truly appears to rise from her, rippling around her body with a serpentine elegance that seems to embrace her, consume her, in a jade fire.

"_Shego_..." That rather pitiful, pining whisper that I'm unable to restrain as I feel as if we're attaining some wondrous peak in sublime unison; her hands lashing out with bewildering adroitness, fingers tensing and uncurling as my blood roars through my temples.

And it halts; she's vanishing from my sight without even a single glance toward my guilty perch, and I'm unable to restrain a familiar sigh of utter, anguished disappointment. It's the second week of our residence here, and it's extraordinary to me how... Well, how ordinary it is. I drifted away that initial evening overcome with a sense of the singularly exotic, and that's yet to wane; but it's become inexplicably familiar, as if every hour of every day of my life has been immersed in this utterly fantastic grotto, tinged with a faint suggestion of the glorious and mystic.

I dream of the unfathomable and peculiar every evening, but even that has become familiar; and it's absolutely magnificent. A quiet trickle of breath flits from between my parted lips as my eyes seem to refocus, a more prosaic reality, even amid the primeval murk of the riotous garden, suddenly overpowering again. I remain upon the balcony, continuing to admire the radiant welter of life that swells forth from the garden in a multifaceted froth as Xi Go returns to her chambers; the quiet rattle of her trunks beneath me seep from her own windows, but they don't seem to inordinately disturb the prodigious wealth of distinctive animals that somehow manage to be at once startlingly unusual and uncannily familiar.

Tan squirrels chitter and dart to and fro amongst the trees, diminutive talons rattling across the bark; I'm astounded, regardless of how often I witness it, to glimpse their sagging flesh drawn taut into a sleek wing as they glide amid the branches. A jumble of distinctive, melodious calls emanates from the hordes of gloriously multichromatic birds nestled within the garden; they coo, chirrup, and squawk, seeming to compete with unrelenting ardor for one's attention amid the cool shadows. My nightclothes tingle with a vague suggestion of dampness upon the fine fabric, a subtle sheen of perspiration clinging to my forehead even as the languorous caress of a tender breeze flutters through the verdant leaves, rustling through my clothing and disturbing the assuredly chaotic tangle of my hair.

I'm discovering, with every passing day, how deeply I love this; the utter serenity; the complete sense of detachment from the ordinary. It truly isn't, despite my parents' most fervent efforts, simply that pathetic, gray and colorless imitation of Saint Petersburg; it's not a pitiful wisp of a previous life, a torturous and cruel illusion of the familiar that dissolves into nothingness whenever I seek to grasp it. This garden seems paradisaical, as though I've finally jettisoned that world of relentless disappointment and crippling anguish; of a cynical fixation upon some dismal, stagnating reality of pasts, futures and progress that somehow ignores the present.

Even when I dream of Ariadne- the delicate warmth of her fingers intertwined with mine so overpoweringly palpable, discovering my cheeks streaked with tears and my voice raw, solely a desolate and tortured heat between my thighs as I awaken to discover nothing but a crushing void amid the seeping warmth of the sun's lazy advance- the lively, idyllic joy of the garden soothes me. Increasingly, my dreams are of a curious melding of Russia and China; of delicate auburn tresses, wide and expressive azure pools, and tender, heart-shaped features becoming entangled almost inextricably with flawless, creamy skin and gently-angled, immersive sloe. My heart throbs and shudders as I emerge from the heaving, molten delight of those dreams, indescribable and unfathomable, flickering caresses and blushing embraces that somehow elude any conscious understanding, even as my waking mind desperately gropes for the lingering, spectral vestiges of those sights and sensations that elude me so cruelly.

I can feel that slick, quaking heat boiling at the very core of my being, pulsating and trembling in torturous synchrony with the unrelenting palpitation of my heart as I reflect upon that; seemingly every morning, now, seems to witness that, intensifying all the more powerfully as I devour the transcendental grace of Xi Go's dance.

"Kimberly?" A sudden, lurching panic shears through that gauzy and diaphanous curtain of unearthly heat, and I wheel about toward the source of the voice; it's joined by a gentle rap at the stout wood of my door. A further, tentative series of blows against the portal, and I approach, finally, upon unsteady legs that seem to have been flooded with a tremulous gelatin.

"Yes?" I manage, at last managing to discover my voice amid the arid, protesting agony of my throat.

"Are, um, are you already awake?" It's either Maria or Valentina; one of them arrives each morning, as per usual, to aid me. My mother and father have naturally long since risen, and we rarely breakfast together any longer; I can't precisely claim to be disappointed about that. Since our arrival, I've been tormented by the palpable tension that arises whenever my parents are with one another; even with the gentle, lingering kisses that consume them at private moments, or my father's bellowing affections, it seems as if an inexplicable weight has settled upon them. They're ever more anxious with me, as well, and mother's hostility toward Xi Go is unbearable, even as father struggles to welcome her as my governess.

"Y-yes, I am." Maria? Valentina? If only I could enjoy the slightest glimpse of the elegant barrettes that cling to their wondrous, voluminous curls; then again, they're maddeningly prone to exchanging even those.

"May, uh, may I come in?" I haven't the slightest inkling of why my maid- whichever of the twins she is- is so achingly anxious this morning.

"Yes, please." With fingers that continue to tingle with an unaccountably enduring electricity, I grasp the knob, gently easing open the remarkably weighty panel that nevertheless fluidly glides upon wholly flawless hinges. She confronts me in her characteristic costume; a sleek, dark dress that flows with a stunning elegance along the graceful contours of her form, accentuating almost indecently the ample flare of her hips and the enviable abundance of her bosom; black heels accentuate the slim curves of her stockinged legs. She's presently clutching the lustrous enormity of a braid before her chest, slender digits worrying upon the sleekly interlaced locks that shimmer with an auburn splendor beneath the sunlight trickling through the window.

"Kimberly." A sweetly tentative acknowledgment as she stands before the entrance, offering me a slightly uneasy smile.

"Is anything the matter, uh... Maria?" It must be Maria, I reason, given the suggestion of a fine ruby clip.

"It's, uh, it's nothing. Really. I suppose I didn't sleep that well." She doesn't appear to have, I realize; her eyes, nevertheless wide and expression, betray a singular weariness, rimmed with black.

"Where's Valentina?"

"Oh, um... With your mother." Mother has become ever more demanding since our arrival; not merely is she virtually bitterly tyrannical with the maids in my presence, but she rarely permits the twins to be quite so inseparable.

"Are you sure that nothing's the matter?"

"I'm certain, Kimberly." An exaggerated smile that parts her subtly swollen lips. "Are you ready for your bath?"

"Sure." Somehow, I've begun to dread that every morning. I ordinarily adore luxuriating in the blissful, scented warmth of the water, the gentle caress of the sponge upon my skin; the delicate, languid tenderness of fingers combing with the utmost delicacy through the voluminous enormity of my hair. Now, it's an exercise in... What I can only consider unendurable frustration; it could only be frustration, an acute sense of some hopeless, longing absence gnawing at every sense, a molten and quivering heat knotting within my chest and stomach as I feel the languid, careless softness of her hands upon my painfully hypersensitive flesh.

Even when she aids me with undressing, I feel as if I'll dissolve into a fit of madness, every whispering manipulation of the fabric, the sudden, icy kiss of the air upon my exposed skin, and the rustling warmth of her breath across my bare body utter agony. It's that sensation with Ariadne, but magnified to a degree unbelievable; it's so harsh, visceral, almost animalistic, as I'm overcome with a need that I can't quite identify. But it's so unique, as well, as though it pervades solely my body like an illness, refusing to seep with that ambrosiac tenderness into my mind.

"Maria?" I finally ask as we pad away from my chambers toward a chamber within the children's quarters that Xi Go once explained was most atypical for such a residence; and it does seem appreciably more recent than any of the other rooms, of sheer walls and floors, tiled with wondrously delicate panels of porcelain graven with an assortment of exotic characters that I assume bear auspicious meanings.

"Yes, Kimberly?" While mother would positively abhor it, Maria is directly beside me, striding in-step with me as though an equal; and I believe she is, even if there exists some lingering vestige of ingrained thought that they're somehow, inescapably and natural, servants. It's an odd duality of the conscious recognition of them simply as Maria and Valentina, and the deeply ingrained recognition of them as our aides.

"I..." Our voices reverberate with a peculiar, rippling hollowness, words colliding with those spoken moments before in a bewildering jumble of tones that threatens to rob my dazed, reeling mind of what little grasp I can maintain upon reality. "Do you like Shanghai?" That's not precisely the question that I'd desired to ask, but it lunges to the forefront of my mind; and I have been pondering that, now, for the past two weeks. Maria and Valentina simply, without complaint, accompany us to whatever destination my father commands; as do Vasilevich and the other loyal body of servants.

"Pardon?" She's behind behind me, her gentle tonality a quiet and slightly distant murmur as she begins adjusting the tap knobs with a quiet squeak of metal above the expansive basin carved into the floor. It's a remarkably deep depression, sleekly-rounded edges flowing into a gentle curve toward the center of the bath; a simmering, crystalline pool has begun to accumulate with remarkable deftness, rising ever further with a curling haze of steam that permeates the whole of the cavernous chamber. The bathroom is one of the few concessions to modernity within the otherwise singularly traditional residence; the few electric lamps and the piped water are so unobtrusive that I barely noticed them until Xi Go remarked upon what an unusual presence they were.

"Do you like it here?" I turn, a slick sheen of perspiration beginning to form upon my forehead at the sultriness swelling through the chamber; her cheeks have begun to redden, a delicate and lovely flush blossoming across her milky skin.

"I... I haven't devoted any thought to it, really." Maria finally responds, following a few pensive moments, her features contorting adorably with a genuine contemplation. "I've been so busy with everything that I haven't given it any thought."

"Doesn't it feel different?" I haven't the slightest inkling of why I'm prodding her so persistently; perhaps I'm also craving a confirmation of that sense that we're a million miles from that past torment.

"It's China." A curiously laconic and slightly absent-minded reply as her slender fingers gingerly roll the lengthy, clinging sleeves of her gown along her sleek arms.

"I... I suppose." Maria confronts me with an inquisitive cock of her head at the palpable disappointment in my own voice.

"Is anything the matter?"

"No. And that's precisely it." I finally acknowledge, gesticulating about me to the singularly exotic tiling of the bathroom; and, by extension, the whole of the foreign and beauteous uniqueness of this home, and the city that teems and and writhes with an overwhelming, livid energy beyond this island of serenity. "I don't feel... I don't feel anything odd about it; it's wonderful."

"I suppose it is." Maria's answer suggests that her sentiments aren't quite so charitable toward our newfound home.

"It's just everything: our garden, this extraordinary house... Even, uh, _Shego_." Regardless of how fervently I struggle, my tongue continues to stumble so hopelessly in striving to emulate the sublime, pure tonality of that glorious name. "Even my governess."

"I'm glad for you." For the briefest of instants, her eternally genial demeanor lapses a bit, as if the first fissures upon a lustrous patina.

"Is something wrong?"

"No. Nothing." With near desperation, she shakes her head, even as she's begun to grip the stout length of her braid. We've been with one another since we were children, and I can't recall a single instant in which she hasn't betrayed some unspoken grief of torment with her relentless worrying at the silken enormity of her braid; it's simply become lengthier and lengthier, and ever more obvious.

"Maria-"

"Nothing's the matter." She snaps, and I'm overcome by an odd duality of pain. Most immediate, and most intense, is the cringing sense that, regardless of our intimacy, she refuses to trust me with anything that's burdening her so enormously, as if she can suddenly, so readily and so conveniently, invoke that gnawing sense of distance that occasionally arises between mistress and servant; another, odd and vestigial, is the aggravation that she's willing to behave so poorly if she actually is a servant.

"A-all right." It occurs to me that her eyes, ordinarily lovely, liquid pools of expressive auburn, are suddenly enormous, frozen with an almost animal terror. That sense of indignation is subsumed amid a rising flood of unbelievable worry for her. "You can tell me anything, Maria. I... I feel like we're sisters. Don't you?"

"I'm sorry, mi-" She halts, lips working guiltily as I've the sense of being stricken. "I'm sorry, Kimberly. Th-there's just nothing the matter. Honestly."

"Very well." Those words barely escape my gritted teeth; my hands fall to my sides, and she approaches, fingers gingerly working upon the slender ivory discs of my nightgown. That vexing sense of grief and abandonment melds with a predictable swelling anew of that familiar, molten heat within the pit of my stomach, my throat suddenly so desperately dry as my eyes linger upon the pouting fullness of Maria's lips, the flushing softness of her cheeks. She averts her gaze from me, mechanically drawing the downy fabric, at last, away from my shoulders; the gown falls to my feet, suddenly, jarringly, baring my skin to the humid caress of the steamy heat beginning to pervade the otherwise spectacular chill of the bath.

I can feel a deeper warmth lunge into my flesh at the subtlest suggestion of her sight upon me, the most infinitesimal, lingering gaze inspiring a sense of reeling faintness.

"I think the bath's ready, Kimberly." Her voice pierces this overpowering, misty haze of excitement, even as I feel my chest heaving with an unaccountable breathlessness.

"Thank you, Maria." I approach the rim, my body suddenly rigid with a jolting bolt of raw, electric sensation that scours across every nerve at the seemingly careless brush of her hand against the small of my back; I fervently hope that she doesn't notice, never mind the mewling whimper that I manage to swallow as it struggles to force itself from my lips, even as some distant fringe of my mind begs for it.

Even the boiling ocean that subsumes me, scalding my flesh with its seething intensity, seems virtually tepid against the roiling, volcanic heat that rages within me. I realize that my eyes had drifted closed only when I register the slick kiss of the porcelain against my spine; I've curled into an awkward seated position, angled forward, a now-unraveled curtain of crimson slick and glimmering with a creeping wetness as I clasp my hands between my knees. Something throbs between my thighs, and I've the distinct sense of bearing near to tears as my breath hitches in my chest again; I feel excruciatingly close to some epiphany, a shattering revelation that eludes me by mere inches as my mind whirls incoherently.

"Is the water all right, Kimberly?"

"Uh-huh." A thoroughly dazed reply to a question that seems to be filtering through some gauzy heap of cotton swathing my senses.

"Did you sleep well?" This sudden effort at such idle, vacant conversation is beginning to strain my already rather tenuous grip upon reality.

"I did. I think." If a bit fitfully; the whole of the evening, I awoke to discover the silken sheets knotted in a tangled heap around me, a throbbing, shuddering torment shooting through me as my drowsy mind struggled to cling to the images that teased and flitted so torturously through my dreams. Whenever I'd awaken, I'd discover my fingers clenching upon my thighs through the fabric, or my hands clasped between my thighs, a molten, angry frustration sluicing into every inch of my body. I was upon the cusp of screaming, simply focusing upon every breath until the cool air drifting across my face lulled me into another vexing series of dreams. "I had odd dreams."

"About what?" A gentle, dribbling patter of water as she immerses a fine cloth into the pool beside me, wringing from it a glinting torrent. The regular, churning squelch of the gently fragrant soap as it's kneaded into a lather caresses my senses; the soap itself is exotically perfumed, sweetly spiced with a regal aroma that's absolutely glorious.

"I don't know. I..." My heartbeat begins to quicken again as I ponder asking her; I somehow feel vaguely ashamed about broaching the subject. "Do you ever have those peculiar dreams?"

"Nightmares?" A slightly distant reply; the fragrance becomes more intense at the first, electric stroke of the silken texture against my skin. She draws the cloth in level, regular strokes across the arch of my spine, drifting from the singularly hypersensitive flesh of my nape to the small of my back at the waterline. I begin to rock in synchrony with that deliberate and achingly tender motion; it seems as if she's seeking to apologize with an uncommonly gentle massage today.

"Not exactly." A vaguely rapturous whisper seeps from between my lips. I love that sensation, the slender softness of her fingers even through the sheer fabric of the cloth.

"What, then?" Another delicate series of strokes; I obligingly, mechanically lift my arms, teeth clamping upon my lips to stifle another soft cry at the rustle of the moistened fabric along the fringes of my breast.

"I don't really know how to describe it." It's an incredible challenge to speak with the subtlest shred of normality as my mind reels and my throat feels as if it's never been introduced to the concept of water.

"Oh. That unusual? Some frightful phantasmagoria?"

"No, nothing like that." Even if I've the sense that there is some fantastic presence haunting my dreams, though it's rather a being of transcendental, beatific splendor, electrifying me with captivating gazes and tormenting me with indescribable caresses. "It's... I feel this terrible pressure in my chest, and this unbelievable heat burning in my stomach." Her hands stiffen for a moment, before resuming her ministrations as nonchalantly as she can manage.

"A-are you... Are you ill, perhaps? Have you felt unwell?"

"No." A slightly perplexed shake of my head. Occasionally, I've the sense that everything is being concealed from me; not knowing what it is, naturally, renders it a bit challenging to discover whether it actually is. "Have you ever felt that?"

"I- I don't know, honestly." I turn, my cheeks a spectacular vermillion from even approaching the topic. "Um... Maria?"

"Yes, Kimberly?" She's begun to extend her hands toward me again, and I'm overcome with the sense that I'll faint if she actually touches me.

"Do you mind if I wash myself?"

"Pardon?" Now, she seems vaguely insulted.

"It's- it's just that I, uh... I sort of have this odd ticklish feeling today." Of a sort. Maria somewhat grudgingly extends the cloth to me as I rise to my feet, descending again with a desperate plunge into the molten pool as the room's torturous chill whispers across my skin. Rather than the glorious caress of her hands, I'm relegated to my own hopelessly inelegant, mechanical ministrations, massaging the scented lather into my pale skin.

"Do you wish for me to wash your hair, Kimberly?"

"Y-yes." Regardless of this delirium, I couldn't conceivably resist that. Maria and Valentina have delighted in that since they were children, relishing the novelty of those flaming vermillion locks; I love it, as well, luxuriating in the tender stroke of slender digits through the rich fulness of my hair, overcome with the singular fragrance of the cleanser. Immersing myself for a brief instantly wholly in that molten ocean, I emerge again, treading toward the edge to offer myself to her eager caress.

I can feel the weighty sheet matted to my spine, clinging with a remarkable steadfastness until her fingers plunge into that massive fall that's begun to trail beneath my waist, gingerly applying a dense stream of the shampoo to its expansive immensity as I lever myself into an awkward crouch; she bundles my hair onto my back, knotting it into an enormous cluster as her slender but startlingly powerful fingers begin their sensuous caress. My eyes flutter closed, a quiet stream of delighted coos escaping of their own volition from my lips, unrestrained and ecstatic, as Maria kneads it with a growing strength into ever sleek tendril. It feels a rapturous eternity, basking in her caress, the all-enveloping scent of some singularly exotic floral fragrance, and the periodic stroke of her fingertips across my bare skin, slick with the slightly gelid matter.

"There." It terminates sooner than I would wish, as per usual; the whole of that wondrous, luxurious froth boils away into a diluted stream along the surface when I reverse myself, dipping fully beneath the blistering water that sends me into a racking fit of coughing as a few droplets seep into my nostrils. I confront Maria's less than vigorous effort at stilling her laughter when I surface fully, sloshing to the edge and allowing her to aid me from the bath.

The chill that encircles me, as bewilderingly harsh and arctic as a plunge into the Neva, is a remarkable relief, seemingly to gouge away every semblance of that shuddering, hypersensitive exhilaration that threatened to achieve an almost maddening height with Maria's lovely, lingering caress. That persistent, pulsating heat between my thighs refuses to recede, but I simply stolidly ignore it as I feel myself being swaddled within the sublime envelopment of a stout and supple terrycloth towel, the beading water lingering upon my blazing skin stripped away in an instant.

I find myself being guided to an upraised platform, a shiver flitting through me at the sudden shock of the damp porcelain against my skin; Maria eases behind me, brandishing the familiar, gold-plated brush, its bristles a bit distended with time, that's endured with us since childhood. It's been some time since I've been afforded the opportunity to comb their hair, however; mother's been unwilling to conscience that. A quiet, contented sigh rushes from my chest at the first, firm, level stroke of the fibers through my hair, followed by another, and another; it's a calming, tranquil rhythm, a constant series of rustling whispers.

"You look distracted, Kimberly." Her voice ruptures the bubble of insulating rapture that's formed around me.

"Do I?"

"You have a lot recently. Ever since we arrived."

"I didn't notice." I murmur dreamily, which would probably confirm that. "I thought that I was doing fine with my studies."

"Oh, you have." Maria has remained with me throughout my courses, though her aid is barely required any longer; I can actually make myself heard with a modicum of coherence in English, now. Somehow, Xi Go's lessons have been absolutely captivating: I barely even notice when the sun is creeping toward the familiar slant that signals the conclusion of our sessions. Often, I find myself groaning with disappointment at the thought that we'll be parting.

"Do you think I'll even need your help with English any longer?"

"Let's not be hasty." I join her in a muted giggle at that. It's odd, the sudden and overwhelming sense of relief that engenders, as if some barrier has finally fallen between us; the cadence of her brushing accelerates, and I feel her inch nearer to me.

"Um... _My name is Kimberly. What's you- yours?_" Somehow, English manages to elude me, despite my exuberance for Xi Go's instruction.

"That's great, Kimberly. Really." I'm glad that there's no suggestion of patronization in those words. "_My name is Maria. It's a pleasure to meet you_." Of course, she'd add some flourish that I couldn't hope to replicate.

"Who taught you English, anyway?" I grouse good-naturedly. "You sound so comfortable with it."

"Your father." There's rather an odd wistfulness in her voice, as if she's pondering some distant moment of utter rapture; I can feel my jaw tensing at bit at that. I can't ever recall father devoting the slightest shred of earnest attention to me as anything but his princess or his bear cub.

"Really?" I emulate Xi Go's unflinching neutrality, hoping that I don't appear as wounded as I genuinely feel.

"Well, when you were at Smolniy, there wasn't a great deal for us to do." That is true; unless they were occupied with mother, who tended to be diverted with her array of women's activities, their existence assuredly would have been achingly dull. "So, your father agreed to teach us English when we asked."

"Oh." I wince as the tines snare within my locks at an effort at a suitably understanding nod.

"Still, though, it's not like we're fluent. Not completely." That seems dubious; my father's as skillful as a native English speaker, given that he once served as a diplomat.

"I see." A glum, sullen murmur. I can't believe that, even at this age, I'm competing for my father's affection as if a brittle little girl. It was wondrous for Maria and Valentina to be so near to my age, particularly with the arrival of my clamorous, detestable brothers, but I could never quite overcome the sense that father may have actually preferred them to me; they're more beautiful, and more... Indefinably Russian than I am; I'm more similar to mother.

"You're doing so well, though, Kimberly. _Truly_."

"Huh?" A rapid litany of blinks until I manage to decipher what she'd intended, which simply further deepens my frustration. "Oh, yes."

"Is something wrong?" The brush glides effortlessly through my hair, now honed to a flawless, sleek stream of silk.

"No. Nothing." Maria continues to comb languorously through it, seemingly relishing the idle tranquility of the moment. "Have you noticed anything wrong with mother and father?" The brush freezes in mid-stroke.

"P-pardon?" A tremor shudders through her voice, as if she's been terrified to near-madness.

"My mother and father." I accentuate that with perhaps unnecessarily proprietary intensity; it feels somehow cruel. "Mother and father, I mean." A beat. "Does it seem like something's the matter with them?"

"I- I don't know." A few pensive instants, after it which it seemingly occurs to her that her brushing has lapsed; she resumes with anxiously trembling hands. "I've- I've, um, I've mainly been with you. Maybe Valentina would know something."

"They've just been... Odd since we arrived." And it has truly been that: odd. Something uncannily, nebulously awry; not as though it's some inordinately overt rupture of normality, but a subtle, peculiar drift from it.

"Well, Valentina and I have been very busy." I'm pleased that I haven't a glimpse of her expression, and that she hasn't of mine as my eyebrows furrow and a scowl creases my lips. She's lying.

"I... I think that it might be time for your lessons, Kimberly."

"Ah." With my consent, her hand drops away, the tender warmth of that languid caress suddenly supplanted with an icy distance and suspicion. "Thank you, Maria."

"O-of course, Kimberly." She replies with such outlandishly exaggerated casualness that she could only be lying. The twins are terrible with deception; they're ridiculous when they attempt anything so benign as misleading me as to what's become of a particularly lovely pastry that we've been coveting.

"Will you tell me if you hear or notice anything?" I turn as she's apparently fleeing headlong toward the exit; she freezes in mid-step, but refuses to turn.

"I-I'll fetch your dressing gown. I must have forgotten it." The door clatters closed behind her, and I'm abandoned with my thoughts again; it's a remarkably solitary experience, struggling to grasp why she's deceiving me, and even about what. I've never known Maria and Valentina to conceal anything from me; anything of import, in any event, a particularly appealing Napoleon notwithstanding. The quaver of her voice, the unbelievable evasiveness of her demeanor- what could there even be? Are they concerned about my parents?

A quiet sigh rushing from my legs, I lever myself to me feet, the towel tumbling with a mute rustle of fabric to the tiled floor. Mother despises Xi Go; that, I've no doubt, though the reason- aside perhaps from being a Chinese- rather escapes me. Father appears rather fond of her, though it's not as if they've any regular interaction. Indeed, I can't quite recall Xi Go having interacted of her own volition with anyone but me; she ignores Chang, beyond an occasional smile tinged with what seems a virtual vicious malice. Even my brothers are little more than a pest that warrants a brief, scolding word in German, or a slightly patronizing smile whenever they're impelled to indicate with rapturous voices some supremely prosaic aspect of China that they've discovered which they somehow believe would be beyond a native's understanding.

"Kimberly?" Maria's gentle tone, still burdened with a remarkable weight of unease, resounds through the door.

"Please come." Immediately, I seize the towel from the floor, draping myself with it again as the portal groans open; even still, a rippling chill floods through me, wrenching a hitching sneeze from my lungs.

"Are you all right, Kimberly?" Any opportunity for a distraction, I suppose, is appreciated; I simply offer her a nod as she presents my dressing gown.

"I'm fine, Maria. _Truly_." That doesn't wring even the slightest suggestion of a smile from her; I know that there's something the matter.

"Is this the right one?" Further evidence; she's been fetching it for the past two weeks. It's not as if I've hundreds of them.

"Yes. Thank you." It's a delicate, gauzy garment; a fragile shell of fine cotton that father vows he acquired from an Arab trader in Tashkent. Delicate, spidering designs trace across the pallid aquamarine, forming exotic geometric forms that seem to clash, shatter, and reform in dynamic motion across the whole of the fabric. Gliding into it, my lips continue to form silent words as I struggle to approach whatever Maria's concealing from me; ultimately, they merely halt, and I greet her with the most inordinately exaggerated, forced smile that I can manage. "There."

"You look wonderful today, Kimberly. You're so beautiful." Often, that sentiment sends a flutter of delight through me, a soaring sense of wondrous joy; today, it feels hollow, pathetic.

"Thank you, Maria. Would you care to fetch _Shego_ for me? I'll be dressed soon." I realize that I can't bear to be in Maria's presence at the moment. I haven't the slightest inkling of what she's concealing, but I can't bear that tortured awkwardness that's arisen as nearly a living presence between us; a veil that's begun to warp my very sense of her.

"Very well, Kimberly."

"It's- it's all right if you wouldn't like to attend the lesson today." She stiffens again beside me as we exit together, but doesn't reply as she drifts toward Xi Go's chambers.

The slap of my bare soles upon the robust hardwood seems almost thunderingly extreme, reverberating through my senses with a startling violence that conjures a sense of a monstrous giant in flawless time with every step. The idle drift of my mind, fixated upon those vague, niggling notions of there being something terribly the matter beneath the patina of normality, diverts me from everything; I barely notice my own surroundings, including the fact that I'm not alone as I arrive at the sublimely elegant splendor of my door.

"Kimberly." If it were possible to leap from one's own skin, I probably would achieve that; as it is, a strangled scream wrenches itself from my lips, my entire body alight with a massive, seething swell of panic. It barely recedes, my heart hammering a furious, staccato tattoo within my breast, as I recognize the voice.

"_S-Shego_." Could Maria have been that deft?

"Is anything the matter?" I pivot with the utmost, virtually hyperbolic nonchalance, as if my pathetic screech and the boiling flush streaking across my cheeks wouldn't suggest that she'd terrified me. She confronts me with a sublimely luminous smile, eyes softening with an almost achingly affectionate warmth; her raven locks are presently drawn away from her cheeks, which is rather a disappointment, bound into what I realize is a spectacularly taut, serpentine braid that arcs across her slender shoulders, drooping to the small of her back.

"You... You just startled me." An understanding nod. I realize that, today, rather than her ordinary formal gown, she's merely a basic, but wondrously elegant, gown; shimmering black fabric, clinging gloriously to the supremely generous and graceful curves of her physique, embroidered with a prodigious wealth of elaborate floral designs. The pallid softness of her skin is visible beneath it, the dress cut at knee level, baring the sleek muscularity of her legs; the neckline droops subtly to bare the wondrous, swanlike contours of her throat.

"I'm sorry, Kimberly. I thought that you'd noticed me." I probably should have.

"I- I'm just a bit preoccupied, I suppose." I acknowledge, slightly guiltily. I notice that she's clutching a bundle of some form of singularly lustrous crimson material upon one arm. "What is that?"

"I hoped that I'd catch you before you dressed." I fervently hope that my skin isn't as ridiculously inflamed as I'm certain that it is at those words, which send a singularly intense, shivering tremor through me.

"O-oh. Uh, why, precisely?"

"Well..." A quirking grin that merely deepens that achingly timid flush. "You said that you loved my dress, didn't you, yesterday?" And I did; on a certain level, I particularly loved that it was, well, _her _dress, so jealously clinging with such taut, eager intensity to her body.

"I suppose so." That would seem noncommittal if it weren't for the intense immediacy of my reply. It was absolutely extraordinary, a variation upon that wondrous gown with which she received us at the pier with my father; virtually luminously sleek, sheer silk stockings, a majestic emerald brocade shot with strands of raven silk, and a beautiful pair of ebon heels. "Why?"

"That's a secret until we're alone." I would be suspicious if I weren't presently scrabbling at the handle, wrenching open the door and ushering her into my bedchamber with what little sense of reserve I can conjure at present. She follows, as though clinging to a sense of servile propriety, at a polite distance, though I notice that she's no compunction about closing the door behind us.

"We're, uh... We're alone." Somehow, that instills me with an inarticulate rapture. In her presence, every sense is amplified to an almost excruciating degree; the delicate trickle of sunlight has become a blazing flood upon my skin; the quiet, tranquil rustle of leaves a roaring typhoon; my heart no longer merely beats, but thunders in a hammering bass.

"What do you think?" Lifting it from its benign perch upon her arm, she unfurls the garment completely, a quiet rustle of silken fabric culminating in a brief, jarring snap as it plunges to its full length. I finally realize what it is: another dress of a similar cut, a narrow slit tracing steeply along the right, as hers had. Rather than that supremely subdued emerald, however, it's a blazing crimson, virtually the shade of my hair; elegant, silvered seams trace along it in graceful, meandering patterns that seem to accentuate its height and the breadth of its chest. I find myself darting toward her, my fingers gliding with utterly reverential rapture across the almost impossible fine, sleek texture.

"Is- is this for me?" Of the momentous jumble of thoughts raging through my brain, I somehow selected that one to voice.

"Of course, Kimberly." I'm so exhilarated that I can hardly muster my characteristic mortification at that familiar, purring chuckle. I should be a paragon of reserve and dignity, as my mother would demand, when receiving such a gift, but I can barely suppress a quail of utter ecstasy as she releases it into my grasp.

"It's so beautiful. It's- it's incredible." It's the total antithesis of the stifling, rigid blandness of the utterly European wardrobe that mother inflicts upon me; a marvel of vibrant, riotous color, rather than the properly demure, subdued purity of what she expects; a sleek, natural complement to my body, rather than a virtually mechanical manipulation of it to fulfill some peculiar archetypal ideal. It's glorious; it's salvation. "This is so spectacular. Are you sure that it's for me?"

"Of course." Another deep, sensual laugh that virtually topples me to the floor; as it is, I find myself settling upon the mattress, folding it atop my lap.

"Mother will never allow me to wear this." That doleful epiphany somehow manages to smother the towering flames of delight swelling within my giddy mind, reducing them to sullen embers of utter disappointment. My palms slap quietly upon the dress, stroking longingly across the foreign delight that, even in my grasp, is utterly unattainable. "I'm- I'm sorry. I think that you wasted your time."

"That's silly, Kimberly." Uninvited, but enormously appreciated, she settles beside me, that electrifying splendor of her slender fingers settling upon my shoulders; even in the midst of this solemn frustration, that sets my skin ablaze with a hypersensitive rapture. Today, however, it manages to soothe me, as well; there's an undeniably tender comfort manifest in the light, languid brush of the slightly callused pads across the juncture of my throat and clavicle. It seems so wondrously, gently intimate.

"Well, it's not." I mutter glumly. "The moment she sees this, she'll have a conniption fit." I don't believe that I've ever actually given voice to those thoughts; I haven't ever actually criticized her once. I haven't had an outlet.

"Who said that she needs to see it?" I don't believe that we can simply become invisible or sidestep reality.

"Huh?"

"Well... Your mother isn't here at this very moment, is she?" Xi Go offers with a conspiratorial whisper; I find that a slightly demented grin is creeping across my lips. "Isn't that the beauty of study? You can be anywhere, so long as your mind can conjure it. It might not be an evening on the Bund, but it doesn't make the dress any less beautiful."

"Y-you're sure?" Even wearing it once, I suppose, would be magnificent.

"Of course I am." A beat. "So, Princess?" That lovely sobriquet occasionally returns, and I can feel my entire body nearly liquefy at the caress of those words.

"Sure." As if any further persuasion is needed; I'm already lunging to my feet, beginning to unfasten my dressing gown with a demented enthusiasm when it occurs to me that Xi Go... Is, well, here. "Oh, god, I'm sorry." Though the thought of undressing in her presence doesn't precisely fill me with an unutterable horror.

"It's quite all right. Will you tell me when you've dressed?" It's vague, but there seems to be a slight reticence on her part, as well; I can feel my smile blossoming to truly ludicrous proportions as my gaze falls upon the gentle sashay of her hips when she exits, turning to offer me one final, encouraging grin before the door closes. I don't believe that I've ever undressed so swiftly, inspecting the gown against my bare flesh in the lengthy mirror that stands before one of the pale ivory walls; it's quite lovely, actually, the vibrant vermillion a subtly deeper shade than my hair, accentuating so enormously the unblemished milkiness of my skin.

I've never actually devoted a great deal of vain, indulgent attention to myself, but I find my eyes drawn to the image captured by the lustrous silvered surface. I probably still appear a frail child by contrast with the full shapeliness of Maria and Valentina, but I can't claim to be displeased with the soft and graceful roundedness of my body; the delicate flare of my hips, the sleek and supple contours of my thighs and legs; even the relatively modest swell of my chest, pert peaks budding in the mild chill. The vast fall of my hair further emphasizes the almost exaggerated pallor of my complexion; it's virtually spectral, though probably my single favorite feature.

"Does it fit well, Princess?" A slightly impatient call, and I find myself hurriedly unclasping the beaded buttons at the rear; I've barely the presence of mind to collect a pair of drawers, gliding into them before finally, with singular rapture, easing into the dress. I'm astounded by the utterly glorious, sensual caress of the silk upon my bare skin, rustling quietly upon me as I tug it snugly onto my body. I'm astonished by how flawless the fit seems to be, clinging wondrously to every swell and gliding across every elegant contour, accentuating with an almost serpentine splendor my body; it seems truly natural, and I adore it.

"It's perfect." I realize that I'm virtually squealing my delight as I scrabble at the knob, nearly wrenching Xi Go into the room beside me as the portal jolts open. "It's perfect. I love it. I love it!" It probably seems perfectly ludicrous, but I can't actually bring myself to care at this very instant as my feet carry me in a deft, whirling dance around her, brandishing its fit from every possible perspective.

"It's beautiful, Kimberly; just as I'd thought." Even reddening from those approving words, I can't restrain myself, finally throwing my arms around her without thought or hesitation. I'm astonished by her height; she actually rises a few inches above my own, my cheek nestling against the majestic, perfumed warmth of the crook of her neck; the level throb of her pulse actually ripples through my ear. In an instant, I realize that I've fastened myself to her, the quickening palpitation of her heart in virtually flawless synchrony with my own. I'm frozen, unable to release her, even as a swell of anxious panic boils through my suddenly fevered brain; I'm terrified by what her reaction will be, if she'll be horrified... If she'll believe I'm completely insane, or disgusting. Her sleek body, gently rounded, dimples slightly beneath the growing tension of my fingers upon the silk of her clothing above her waist.

"T-thank you, _Shego_..." My whisper flutters across her neck, and I find myself unable to concentrate upon anything but how gloriously perfumed her raven locks are, how wondrously soft she is in my embrace; it's as if I'm with Ariadne again, and yet the sensations and emotions are so singularly unique to Xi Go.

"You're welcome, Kimberly." She's stiffening, even though she takes no action to remove me. A subtle tremor rises into her voice, the elegant warmth of her hands drifting onto my shoulders. I discover my eyes fluttering closed of their own accord, an extraordinary, shivering heat settling like a cloak over me; it's as if the whole of my body is wreathed in a flame of such intensity that everything is hopelessly chilled by contrast. I've begun to tremble, every nerve alight with a yearning to be even nearer to her, to feel her envelop me wholly. A quiet, tentative rap resounds like an explosion from the door at that instant, and she parts without a further word, abandoning me with glazed eyes and a thundering pulse.

"Yes?" I'm astonished by how unfazed her voice seems, as if that moment hadn't affected her in the slightest. Then again, the more realistic portion of my delirious and bleary mind supplies, she probably wasn't.

"O-oh, Miss _Shego_." Maria and Valentina insist upon addressing her as 'miss', and they've confronted similar difficulty in pronouncing her name; either that, or they've simply been so indulgent as to deliberately mispronounce it for my sake. "I was searching for you. And you're here."

"Yes. We've already begun our lesson, Maria." Somehow, Xi Go is endowed with an extraordinary facility for distinguishing amongst the twins, and she's never deigned to enlighten me as to what her secret is.

"O-oh." It seems to unnerve Maria and Valentina, as well. They tend to delight in being virtually indistinguishable.

"Would you care to sit in today?"

"I'm sorry, but the mistress asked me to attend to something today." An obvious untruth, but I appreciate that she understands that I've no desire to see her at present.

"You're certain? You are Kimberly's maid-"

"It's all right." I finally interrupt, my voice slightly hoarse and breathless. "I'm sure that my mother's request is more important."

"Of course. Tomorrow, then, Maria." A genial dismissal, and Maria seems to vanish without a further word; Xi Go turns to me with an expectant expression. "Is anything the matter?"

"What do you mean?" I'm as wretched a liar as the twins, though I struggle to be as ingenuous as possible, which is as persuasive as Mischa, our Borzoi, feigning total innocence after a ham vanished from the table with a resounding thud, his fur clotted with sauce.

"Both of you seem strained. Did you have a fight?"

"I... No, not exactly." Why bother deceiving her? I'm craving any semblance of intimacy, of companionship, with Xi Go, so it's not as if I should remain aloof about this. "She lied to me."

"About what?" Xi Go appears rather concerned, easing nearer to me; I find myself settling with a quietly resigned sigh upon my mattress. She remains standing. "Kimberly?"

"I don't know." Which seems patently idiotic. "I- I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's just that I know when Maria and Valentina are lying."

"It's not difficult to discern." Xi Go offers with a brief flicker of a smile. "It was obvious that both of you were lying just a moment ago."

"That's what I meant. And- and they've been like sisters to me; my parents took them in and cared for them after their parents died. Even if they're our maids, I've..." A tremulous breath as I discover that my grief is infinitely deeper than some irritation over a seemingly trivial deception. "I've felt like they were my family; I love them. I love them much, much more than my own brothers, and they've just- they've just started drifting away from me since we came here.

"Everything else has been so beautiful here; I love Shanghai, I love this home, more than I ever could have Paris. I..." I love having you as a governess, though my lips refuse to form those words. "I just don't know what's the matter with them. Or with my parents. It's as if I'm the only one who can perceive how beautiful and idyllic this place is, and everyone else is going positively mad. I'm afraid that they don't love me anymore; that I'm just becoming their mistress, that they're drifting apart from me. I've never known Maria or Valentina to lie to me. And... And Maria nearly called me 'miss' today."

"I see." There's a vague inkling of comprehension, but it's obvious that Xi Go doesn't quite understand our relationship.

"Only when we're with mother do either of them call me 'miss', and Maria almost did so when we were alone. I don't ever expect anything from them but what I think you could from a sister; and they've always seemed to like it. I- I mean, I bathe them, too, if they want, or help them with their hair like they do me." Though I haven't recently, I realize.

"I do understand, Kimberly." I confront that with an inquisitive cock of my head.

"You do? You- you had servants, or-"

"No, no." A further swell of bewilderment at the slightly bitter laughter that threatens to overtake her. "We were servants; not indentured, but our family was desperately poor."

"O-oh." And I'm a fool, whining about something so trivial to her.

"My father was an aide to a village merchant, and we were expected to care for their family, as well. It was just ordinary."

"Oh."

"He had a daughter that was my age, and we became friends. We were only four or five at that point, but I was already working to help my family." It's extraordinary how ancient she appears as she describes this, as if she's addressing a time centuries in the past, though she could scarcely be ten years my senior. "She was very kind; she tolerated my commonness, which was probably more than I should have expected." A gentle and wistful smile. "They were a very noble family, like yours; the mother and father despised me, but they could begrudge their daughter nothing."

"Why?" I've been silent throughout this, and I feel ridiculously naïve as I finally ask that.

"Why? I wasn't of their station. Our family was one of the meanest in the village; my uncle was a butcher, and that contamination is something that can stigmatize an entire family."

"What do you mean?"

"It's shameful to kill animals; it's a criminal, polluting act that tarnishes your spirit."

"But, you eat meat, don't you?" The meals throughout the preceding weeks have been rife with it, actually, prepared with such exotic splendor that it often seemed more an aesthetic piece than humble nourishment. It was certainly more complex and beauteous than what I've experienced in France, and assuredly more so than Russian cuisine.

"Of course." A beat. "That must not make much sense to you."

"Well, no, but..."

"Buddhism is a powerful influence; like most all religions, it has a powerful utility in controlling the population, and aiding in governance. I'm sure that you've read pieces from Marx." I gather that Xi Go's mentor was much more enlightened and broadly-informed than Natalya Federovna. "For Buddhists, it's evil to slaughter animals; but, of course, humans do not fare that well without their flesh, so it is the lot of the lower classes to shoulder that spiritual taint for the well-being of their betters." A mildly wry grin. "But this did not bother Meilan. She and I became friends, even though I was her servant, and she should not have acknowledged me as anything but an inferior."

"That sounds wonderful." It truly does. "I... Did you feel as if you were sisters?"

"I don't know. Not all siblings feel that sense of intimacy and love, Kimberly; but we were very close." A slightly tentative smile, as though this isn't the most comfortable topic for her. "But, that, of course, cannot be forever." And such resignation, as if she's simply identifying the natural flow of life.

"Why?"

"We were not of the same class. I loved her very much, however; and, despite her mother's misgivings, I was even there to minister to her when her feet were bound."

"I don't understand." Again. She must believe that foreigners are hopelessly ignorant, particularly as she's expressed such knowledge of Europe throughout our lessons.

"Yes, European girls don't practice that, do they? Mine were not, of course; I was hardly worth keeping for my parents." Stated so matter-of-factly, as though it's completely ordinary for a child to be considered worthless. "It's illegal now, though it matters for very little, but there was a time when every girl's feet would be bound for her to be considered marriageable amongst the Chinese. The Manchu do not, but even they imitated the tradition."

"Bound?"

"Broken, twisted, and set into a beautiful lotus shape." That's horrifying; I fear that my expression rather vibrantly betrays my sense of total disgust. "It is, I am certain, every young girl's desire to have the finest golden lotuses in China."

"B-but, why?"

"It is beautiful." A pensive pause. "Why do you find certain things to be beautiful? Why do Europeans love women with full bodies, even when a graceful and slender form is coveted elsewhere?"

"I suppose."

"It is painful. She suffered terribly, even if she could not cry out for fear of ruining it; I know that, but I envied her desperately. Even before that, I fed her buns to soften her feet, and joined her in prayers to the Bodhisattva and the gods that it would be successful, that her feet would be most glorious." A wan smile. "It was extremely difficult, but she begged her parents to allow me to remain with her. It is months, you understand, and we could not leave for reasons of privacy and dignity; she had no sisters, and very few friends. She asked for me. I think that was one of the happiest moments of my life, even if I knew that I would never join her in that.

"My parents were relieved to be rid of my burden." Xi Go's expression blackens dismally, as if there's some secret and gruesome significance to what is already a terrible sentiment.

"Why, um... Why were your feet never bound?"

"Because I am not marriageable. My parents had no money and no assets for a dowry, and I was considered cursed for the terrible omens that surrounded my birth. I was separated from my many brothers even when an infant, and they barely acknowledged my existence. They needed only my labor, if I could offer it. I was worthless." She's beautiful, and sublimely talented; I can't even begin to envision how she could possibly be considered so useless. "But Meilan nonetheless cared for me. They fed me, and cared for me; I actually could bathe, which was a remarkable rarity for us. They... They ridiculed me when I thought it necessary to dip the _Kuae Tsy _in my tea. To disinfect them, you understand." Xi Go seems oddly blissful as she recounts that. "That was the first moment when I ever ate with ivory _Kuae Tsy_; it was as if I was a princess."

"But... What happened?" I'm overcome with an aching guilt as I speak those words, as if forcing her to acknowledge that reality in explaining it to me might reverse what could have simply been that idyllic, fantastic existence.

"I stayed with them, and was retained as her servant. Even though I cared for her for those aching nights, fetching her water and holding her as she wept silently into my shoulder... Even though I think that I loved her more than anything I ever had, I was still her servant, her inferior. I- I was actually the first to see, to gently caress, those golden lotuses, but that did not seem to matter." There's an oddly timid quality to her voice as she explains this, though I don't quite understand. "I... I was still a servant, as I said, and could not remain her friend always, particularly as she aged and grew more beautiful with every passing day. Her feet were glorious, and I was a hopeless and crude girl; she was betrothed to a powerful administrator's son, and was destined for the court.

"She found other friends, those more consistent with her station. I- I wept for hours when I learned that they would not conscience me, that they would not allow me to participate in their games, and certainly not share in their secrets and rituals. I was an outcast, and Meilan simply forgot about me."

"How could she have? I could never just cast aside Maria and Valentina. I love them." And I truly do, however bewilderingly complicated my emotions toward them are increasingly becoming.

"Because, Kimberly, that is what she should have done. I was not worthy of her friendship."

"That's- that's just ridiculous." I realize that she expects me to understand, to be quietly accepting of whatever is done here; and I am mortified by my mother's brashly proclaimed ignorance, but this isn't something that seems fair or human. "I can't just toss away Maria and Valentina like they mean nothing to me, and it's not fair that they should just act as if that's what's happening."

"I didn't mean precisely that." Her voice becomes subtly firmer, interrupting what's rapidly become an intemperate rant. "You are different; Russia is different from China."

"Not really." I fume. "I- I mean, it's not exactly different." Mother's pompous fixation upon class and station certainly don't suggest that there's any meaningful distinction. Perhaps she's been so very kind to Maria and Valentina, but I can visualize her in Meilan's position acting in precisely that manner. "And I'm tired of it. I... I suppose that I'm disappointed. I thought that everything might be completely different here."

"China is an old empire, and it was much like Europe when they were struggling with their dark ages." A quiet sigh. "That's why it's so very difficult for everyone now to accept that we... We are defeated people; that an empire older than your messiah must now kneel before those that were living in darkness when we were achieving glorious heights of wisdom."

"Oh." A brief, thoughtful pause. "I must sound perfectly naïve. Perhaps just stupid and ignorant, thinking that... That you must be as primitive as my father says, that, well..." You're like children.

"No. Ignorance is not stupidity; ignorance can be corrected, and you are learning."

"It still doesn't explain why Maria and Valentina are acting so strangely, or why my parents are." That peculiar, neutral cast arises into her deep sloe eyes. "Do you have any idea?"

"It's not my place to speculate."

"Why? Because you're my tutor?"

"Because I'm not a member of your family, Kimberly. I can't very well involve myself-"

"I want to know if you've learned anything." I snap, with truly outrageous temerity. It's the height of hypocrisy, imperiously demanding an answer from her as if she's a common servant while I opine about the beautifully egalitarian relationship between my maids and me, but I'm upon the verge of losing my mind as I struggle to decipher what's ravaging this family. That frustration is compounding with the perpetual, electric susurration that ripples and snaps across my nerves like a possessing spirit, heightening ever further in Xi Go's presence.

"No." She replies, voice level and unwavering; she behaves as if she's speaking with a petulant child, which is precisely what I am.

"No?" I'm dangerously near to humiliating myself with something for which I'll never manage to atone. "What do you mean, no?"

"Exactly that." She rises, suddenly towering above me upon soaring heels. "I'm your governess, Kimberly. It's not my place, and not my desire, to intervene in your family's affairs. Whatever is happening between your parents, or with them and your maids, is only of your concern." An aching eternity of silence compressed into a few moments as it occurs to me that she knows exactly what's transpiring.

"Why won't you tell me? Truly?"

"As I've said, Kimberly. It's not my place, and you wouldn't want to hear any of this second- or third-hand as gossip. You wouldn't. It's not as if I can claim complete knowledge of it, anyway." She returns, settling beside me again with a low sigh.

"I... I'm sorry, _Shego_." I don't feel that intensely apologetic, and I can't quite overcome the simmering anger that's melding with that uncanny sense of nervous excitement to propel me to heights of emotional agitation that I rarely experience, even at the apogee of those miserable monthly ordeals.

"Please, don't apologize. I know that this isn't comfortable for you; you don't like the thought of knowing so little about your own family."

"I hadn't even given the slightest thought to it until this. I just feel like a fool, as if everything is transforming around me and I haven't noticed until this instant. And it's not like this is anything meaningful or concrete; Maria just lied to me. But... It makes me realize that I have been noticing a lot, and I just haven't quite understood."

"Your family is more complicated than mine." She offers. "But, they are a great deal kinder. They do care for Maria and Valentina as if they're their own daughters, don't they?"

"Yes. They... Well, they expect that they'll be our maids, as well, but no one has been that demanding until recently." My murmur probably betrays how irritated I am with mother's imperious and commanding demeanor; it's as if she's eager to accentuate with inordinate severity the disparities between master and servant to compensate for her past kindness. "And mother seemed so angry with father. Especially-" Especially with you.

"Yes?" I can't bear to even glance at her for fear of discovering that she's read my thoughts.

"I don't know." I lie; I don't care how pathetically unpersuasive it is.

"Would you like to start your lesson?" Xi Go finally ruptures the unsettling silence that's devoured us. My hands have begun to ache from the tension that wracks them, clenched into trembling fists upon my lap.

"Pardon?"

"Your lesson? Do you remember what we studied yesterday?"

"I... Yes, I do." The economic transformation of Great Britain in the eighteenth century and its effect upon the Napoleonic Wars, followed by a grueling ordeal of an English lesson that nonetheless managed to be positively riveting, even if Xi Go was forced to harangue me at every instant to actually speak. I find myself positively enraptured by every word that issues from her full, peculiarly dark lips; the sublime, melodic splendor, perfectly poetic, of each utterance that manages to rob me of every semblance of coherence.

"I take it that economics is not the most captivating topic for you."

"Well..." A desperate, unnecessarily protracted swallow as I struggle to conjure the appropriate words; they elude me. "No. I don't know, _Shego_. I understand that's important, but it doesn't feel as if it is. I- I mean," I discover myself rising, gesturing to the beatific clash of the sun's luminous liquid gold with the wondrous, shadow-dappled coolness of the garden, "It doesn't feel as if trade, currency, and wars have any connection with what I see here. What do the squirrels care about the Raj? Why should anyone even think about that when- when there are those incomparable plants and trees blossoming outside of my window?"

"I understand." A wondrously tender smile. "Do you remember what the garden is called?"

"A scholar's garden." I reply immediately, without thought; I'm captivated by that romantic notion.

"Do you remember why I told you they are there?"

"So that a scholar can find the tranquility to think."

"Exactly." She rises beside me, ushering me toward the window lattice; one hand upon my shoulder, her other expansively sweeps along the verdant perfection that confronts us. "The life of a Confucian scholar was miserable; he was a government official, forced to learn, relearn, and relearn again the orthodoxies and philosophies that guided his life and his career. It was profoundly joyless, and he could find respite in a place like this; it has no connection with the sorrowful realities of economics or war or government. There is no governance but the will of heaven, and man's government is but a paltry and feeble parody of it."

I have no reply, beyond a vague nod as I contemplate what she's told me. I can feel a fundamental, primordial rhythm in this garden, beyond the sculpted and artificial glamor of the Versailles impersonators that litter Europe; it doesn't feel as if there's any struggle to tame anything, or to reverse what seems so perfectly true and natural. "I think that's beautiful. Would Meilan have married such a scholar?"

"I would imagine so."

"Would you have wanted that?"

"I don't know." Xi Go's hand trembles but for a moment, tensing subtly upon my shoulder. "There is no place for women in that life."

"I don't think that I could bear it, _Shego_. I... I know that I'm probably a terrible student, but I want to learn; I don't only desire to be a dependent, to be cared for by someone who will never respect me." I don't want a husband; that occurred to me, quite suddenly and ferociously, as Ariadne and I lay together, she speaking of a conversation that frightened her terribly. She mentioned that her parents were already discussing betrothing her to Duke Vlastinov's son, a dreadful young man with a fixation upon martial manners and leaden feet as suited to dance as a horse's; I could only think that it was a terrifying notion, the thought of being... Of being forced to be with a man; I longed only to be with Ariadne. She told me that she could envision nothing more wonderful than our being together like that for an eternity.

"I want to be like you." I don't realize that I'm speaking until those words that have lingered in my mind since our first meeting, and that unearthly sense of familiarity, emerge from my lips.

"Kimberly?"

"I- I want to be like you. You told me that you were apprenticed to a German, that he taught you what you know."

"Not all of it, but he was very thorough."

"Couldn't anyone do so?"

"That was most unusual, Kimberly. And, even then, your parents will expect you to marry." It's not as if I've never pondered that, but stating it with such incredible bluntness inspires a welter of anguished tears within my eyes.

"I... I know." My entire body has become rigid, wracked with a dejected tremor. "I know." My voice is barely a whisper as my eyes sightlessly absorb the idyllic magnificence of the garden. "I know."

"But, not yet." Xi Go struggles to inject a levity into her voice that I'm certain will not reach her glorious eyes. "And you have much to learn."

"I don't feel much like English or economics today, _Shego_." I'm overcome with an unaccountable, crippling exhaustion, despite the early hour, that inspires a desire for nothing more than sleep.

"That's fine."

"What do you mean?" I don't believe that I've ever confronted such flexibility with my lessons.

"It's fine if you don't wish to study English or economics right now, Kimberly. It's not as if a single day will matter, or even a week, or a year. I'm the one who tells your parents of your progress, aren't I?" Such an intensely conspiratorial whisper beside my ear; that rigid misery is rapidly transforming into a liquid exhilaration, a flushing excitement flooding across my skin.

"Truly?"

"What do you want to know, Kimberly? Anything?"

"Tell me about China. And- and not what China's exports are, or who its leader is, or even the great battles that the Chinese have fought. I want to know... Well, about things like the garden."

"I'll tell you a story." I feel vaguely childish, as if she's upon the verge of offering me a fairytale.

"A story?"

"Let's be seated; it's a complex and unusual story that I only learned when my master taught me to read."

"All right." We are, silk rustling upon silk, settling onto my bed. A certain, unaccountable serenity washes over me, and I feel a yearning to nestle against her as I had with Ariadne. "Who was your master?"

"Didn't you wish to hear the story, Kimberly?"

"I was simply curious."

"His name was Blue Dragon." A beat. "_Lan se long_, actually; it means Blue Dragon."

"That's an unusual name for a German." It truly is; I gather that he hasn't been German, such as it is, for some time.

"It isn't his actual name, but he introduced himself to me with that, and it's much more..." A contemplative moment. "Comfortable, I suppose, than anything."

"Was he kind?"

"No." I start at the sheer intensity of that reply.

"No? Then, why did you remain with him?"

"He was my master, and he was the only one who would or could teach me what he did. It was precious to me; even if I often hated him, I respected him deeply."

"Will you teach me Chinese eventually, _Shego_?"

"Why would you ask me that so suddenly?"

"I'd rather learn that than English." That elicits a quiet laugh from her. "What?"

"You'd rather learn a language of the past than the future?"

"I'd rather learn a language of the present; and, presently, that's what entices me. I care nothing for English."

"Very well, if you also learn English to your parents' satisfaction. I will begin today, with the story; I will try to teach you simple words."

"Do you have a book?" I notice that there's nothing in her possession, and that she's not moved to collect anything.

"I have read this so often that I have no need for a book."

"Does it end well?" It suddenly occurs to me that I've no stomach for tragedies.

"I do not know; the author never finished it. No one knows what its end is, nor can anyone." A slightly solemn smile. "But, it is very tragic; and very humorous, and solemn, and mystical."

"Oh. Still, please." I urge her, feeling her warmth begin to overtake me beside her.

"Very well... One day," her voice dips to a quiet, serene tone; it somehow, in its poetic splendor, conjures an image of a tranquil, windswept mountain amid luscious and verdant nature, "One day, as a Taoist priest and Buddhist monk were arguing, they came upon an unusual stone..."


	4. Dream

A shimmering flicker of emerald, swelling into a radiant, shivering haze that flares across my sight. It begins as a murky, virtually imperceptible gleam, intensifying in its brilliance and clarity until it consumes my senses with its disorienting enormity, as if it's expanding to devour the world itself. And it evaporates, as deftly as it arose, as if it truly never existed; not even the minutest trace of that radiance endures upon my vision as my eyes snap open, beholding the featureless, impenetrable darkness of the cool evening air.

Every evening, I've been buffeted by these peculiar visions, seeping into dreams that are themselves becoming increasingly restless and tumultuous. As I slumber, it's as if I become another person entirely; as if my mind is transplanted to the distant reaches of some alien universe, rife with transcendental but uncannily familiar sights that tease and flit across my vision as if to deliberately remain cruelly beyond the reach of my groping mind. Faces, voices, bewildering, soaring structures and unbelievable violence; moments of almost aching serenity and tenderness; the incomparable, shivering rapture that continues to scour across my nerves; everything is joined by a peculiar, gossamer thread of glorious jade.

Even when my dreams are not invaded by such peculiar visions, they're no longer what had been my perpetual companions in those hours of uninterrupted black. The delicate, clasping warmth of Ariadne's hand, of her presence, has remained, but her features- unyieldingly tender and hopeful- have been supplanted by another's; and even that delicate heat has intensified, the fingers sleek and gracefully tapered, the silken caress of her palm upon mine tinged with an uncanny electricity. Eyes of limpid russet have become sloe, gently angled; a delicate flush displaced by a flawless, creamy magnificence. And it's perpetually accompanied by muted, regular click of a pendant, rattling rhythmically upon its silvered chain.

My lips are parted, drawing deep, furious gasps as my chest heaves with a breathless intensity, as if that molten heat that boils within my stomach, pooling lower with a tortured dampness, has begun to suffocate me. Every nerve is alight, even the limitlessly delicate brush of the fine silk sheets upon my skin an excruciating caress of knives; it's a sense of utter desolation, a yearning for the unutterable fruition that I so rarely, but sublimely, discover in the midst of those whirling and unfathomable fantasies.

"Shego." My mouth forms that word, the pronunciation skewed oddly, as if I'm speaking another name entirely, however familiar it is. For the briefest of instants, a sense that the voice that emerges from my lips, even the language, isn't correct. It's a jarring, swimming disorientation, as though my soul, for the most ephemeral moment, has realized that it does not rightfully belong to this body.

And it vanishes, the rafters a subtle striation of shadow across the ceiling, my eyes blinking away the bleary murk that lingers upon my sight. Tears of wrenching, inarticulate frustration continue to boil from them, carving scalding seams across my cheeks as I simply lie upon my back, a stout mass of silk pillowed beneath my diligently-brushed hair. It's a matter of several further minutes until I can actually quite identify where I am; within the confines of my bedchamber, the sublime fragrance of the garden whispering in perfumed gusts through the window lattice, melding blissfully with the lingering traces of the evening's meal.

And I begin to recall whom I am: Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym, even while another name from my dream continues to resound through my thoughts as it diminishes to little more than a wisp of a memory. And yesterday's delights, Xi Go serenading me with the transcendental strains of her voice as she recited a most singular tale of a young man born of the essence of an uncarved stone that remained from creation; of the enduring love of a weeping flower that bound his spirit to another; of his most extraordinary life within a garden much like this. It was a dreamy, wistful, and oddly melancholy tale of loss and controversy, of struggle and a hopeless search for the unattainable; and it was merely a tiny fraction of the vast sweep of a narrative that she somehow recited from memory, every poetic flair and exotic verse wholly intact. Xi Go even managed to instruct me in the Chinese; I've begun to learn rudimentary words, such as that glorious dress that, even now, I clasp to my chest: _Zanze_.

As sublimely as her voluptuous lips caress the German language, in a manner that I've never quite heard or could even envision, her speech in Chinese- in her dialect or what she assures me was the original tongue of the story- is of such a transcendental, melodious delight that I can scarcely believe it could be spoken by man. Every tone seems incomparably musical, pure, resoundingly wondrous; every delicate pitch flawlessly defined, and yet melding with a liquid grace into the next. I could barely contain a groaning anguish at the notion of our abandoning our lesson, so she continued until the darkness began to sweep across the horizon, a deep and melancholy violet finally overtaking the blistering vestiges of the vermillion sun in its final gasps.

And we dined together. For the past several weeks, I've largely dined alone; I've barely even seen my parents, and it seems as if Maria and Valentina have begun to avoid me, as well. Even Dmitri and Timofei are but mere specters, albeit hopelessly clamorous ones, their voices playfully upraised while I strive to focus upon my lessons. It's as if my universe has begun to narrow to the scented enclave of this chamber and the garden; as though my very existence can comprise nothing but the bittersweet, sentimental embrace of that wilted shadow or the vermillion warmth of my room. It seems oddly reminiscent of what Xi Go recounted of Meilan, the friend that she adored so immensely in her youth; of that sense of dismal imprisonment amidst the gilded prison of pretension and class, of the elegant confines of aristocracy.

The scent continues to caress my senses, so wondrously evocative of that tender, serene silence in the wake of the almost overpowering, shivering exhilaration of the tale that Xi Go had recited to me. It was so unique from western romances; the peculiar, wandering, almost conversational tone of the narration, and even the characters themselves, seemed unbelievably powerful and human. It was possible to be so angry with the personalities that I'd already begun to love that I felt they may simply have been my fellow inmates within this peculiar cage of lacquered crimson and sullen, perfumed shadows. Perhaps it was the resonant gurgle of my stomach that truly interrupted our 'lesson', as she didn't seem that eager, either, to halt; I could feel her warmth so beautifully near to me, my cheek nestled against her shoulder with an intimacy that had been so singular as she captured the exotic cast with such remarkably theatrical prowess.

It's as if I immersed myself in her presence, an aura of electrical, subdued passion, as though yearning to erupt through the calm at any instant; I could virtually feel her embrace enveloping me, the delicate heat of her body throbbing with a pulsating splendor through my own. I felt complete beside her; perhaps more so than even with Ariadne, my mind guiltily acknowledges. It's a peculiar sensation, that total awareness of myself beside her, simultaneously melding with a sense of union with her; the whole of it blanketed in an odd, molten heat that continues to ripple and throb through me with almost excruciating intensity. When I'm without her, it's as if my life is simply suspended; merely the vaguest trace of awareness endures, even as the minutes seem to dilate into hours, the hours into unrelenting, wrenching eternities that I can hardly bear.

The meal that we shared seemed magical. It's not as if I've been horrified by what the chef has prepared in previous days, but everything- regardless of how vibrantly exotic and flavorful it may have been- was but the most insipid, flavorless banality against the experience of savoring it with her. The sleek, elegant bowls and dishes appeared livid with incomparable color, the burnished vermillion of the odd jumbles of what she explained to be sauce-darkened fish and vegetables; they sat as exotic carbuncles upon a flawless bed of white rice, delicate curls of steam caressing them with what seemed a mystical sensuousness, as if ribbons of mist enveloping priceless treasures.

And she finally explained the formerly unresolvable enigma of the _Kuae Tsy_; those elegant, beauteous shafts of burnished ivory that gleam so gloriously beneath the rippling incandescence of the lamps that cast an impossibly pervasive gleam across the chamber. I felt as if I would collapse, the bowl virtually tumbling upon my lap, as she seized my hand with the tenderest of embraces to position the lengths within my fingers, guiding them delicately into the pallid ocean of rice. I could barely focus upon anything but the gentle, vibrant gleam of her eyes as she demonstrated, again and again, with such beautifully fluid, languorous strokes; and, even then, in the desolation of her warmth when she finally decided that I should attempt it, I was so hopelessly cumbersome that I felt as if I'd simply wilt away into nothingness at her giggle.

Even still, it was an extraordinary experience, finally managing to deliver an occasional morsel the complete distance to my lips; particularly when she demonstrated her technique of lifting the bowl before her mouth in a manner that assuredly would have horrified mother. Then again, her hands upon my skin would have; I can recall the dark scowls that would confront me when I would claim Ariadne's, or melt into her arms at dreadful concerts and lectures. Everything, I'm certain, she would deem most perniciously uncivilized; and that seems all the confirmation I should require to embrace it wholly. I've begun to love China, or at least the China that greets me every morning in the form of Xi Go's luminous gaze or the sleek, poetic grace of her dance that I've continued to furtively observe, even as that sight inflames an indescribable torment that refuses to abate; a persistent, cringing, throbbing heat and moisture that's as rapturous as it is unbearable.

Particularly now, as I feel the weight of my hands upon my breast through the stout layer of silk; they tingle, my breath coming in hopeless, shuddering gasps, as if I'm tearing every shred of air from my lungs with the subtlest caress. It seems forbidden, that peculiar, jolting welter of excruciating delight; it's the harvest of those gasping, whispering, panting, feverish dreams, but undiluted by the delirium of slumber. It's raw, so powerful, so intense, that I know that there must be something the matter; perhaps I'm ill, or afflicted with something, but I can't overcome how... How perfect it is. It's more intense than even those odd, heart-throbbing moments of tremulous joy in Ariadne's arms; those instants of unutterable rapture, when her lips felt so near to mine, her pulse tearing through me with the heat of her breasts.

"_Shego_..." I'm compelled to whimper her name, her features rising with impossibly glorious detail into my sight, as if she's suddenly materialized into full, living splendor above me. Her lips, full and uncannily, exotically dark; the delicate, almond expressiveness of her sloe eyes; the incomparably fine, pale cast of her skin. And her hands; I can feel a desperate prayer snaking through my bleary brain, begging for my hands to be her own, to consume me with that electric perfection that completes me.

Something unusual, tingling, molten, and hot, is stirring between my thighs as they work together almost of their own volition; my entire body has begun to stiffen, a litany of quiet, mewling cries working themselves from my lips as I'm certain that the universe has begun to implode around me. I can barely feel anything but myself; everything has narrowed into that glorious, cruel heat, robbing me of breath. It's as if I'm nearing some penultimate experience; perhaps it's death itself, though I somehow can't possibly begin to care.

And an impossible, blistering flare of light explodes before my vision, snapping my attention away from that ever swelling need. It's not an illusion; it's a palpable presence in emerald, as if the luminescence is endowed with its own crushing weight. My hands snap away from my breast, and I feel myself vaulting to my feet, the wood cool and oddly humid beneath my bare soles. The dress that had been folded against my chest is gently set aside upon the bed, and I discover myself being lured toward the source of that impossible, all-enveloping glow.

It's as if the surreal contents of my dreams have been given form; everything is bathed in varying shades of jade, from an almost impenetrable thickening of shadows to vision-scalding radiance at its most intense. My steps resound hollowly throughout the chamber, and I'm stricken at the impossible silence that's overtaken everything; a silence that simply cannot exist in nature. It's an improbable void of sound, a deafening and overwhelming muteness that raises my awareness of everything in that singular oblivion. There's no longer the familiar chirp and chitter of insects and the delicate rustle of breeze through the expansive foliage; suddenly, even the wind has ceased to be.

"W-what?" My own voice seems to thunder above the sinister nothingness, tinged with the silent sound of that shimmering color. As I approach the window lattice, my steps slow; my entire body does, as if time has begun to dilate. My breaths become more labored and ponderous, and I feel as if I'm struggling against an invisible presence, the jade haze becoming a tangible force that lashes at my flesh; my hair rises away from my cheeks and shoulders, drifting lazily before my face as though

truly levitating.

"_Shego_!" That shout vanishes into absolute nothingness; there's no stirring elsewhere within the garden or the compound, and I've the eery sense of complete isolation. I can actually feel the absence of any other life, as though my family has been scoured away by that force; and yet I know that they're with me, rippling through an unearthly curtain that separates me from this apparition. I can suddenly feel everything, and it's utterly singular; a divine revelation, and I'm shedding the bodily constraints of this corporeal form.

"What is this?" My hands are suddenly, unaccountably black beneath the glow; the darkness traces across my arms, peculiarly textured, as if a second layer of skin. It vanishes as I study it more intensely, as if deliberately fleeing my sight. Pressing through the doors of the lattice, my palms gravitate toward the slick, cool stone of the balcony; it's impossibly warm, nearly liquid, as if reality itself is distending and decaying. My sight, and the pulsing emerald aura, are drawn toward the swirling vortex of oblivion at the garden's center; it radiates from the pagoda. It's not visible amid the impossible thickening of ebon, but I've no doubt of it.

It's pure madness, but my feet find an extraordinary purchase upon the stone, before my entire body pinwheels into the streaming blackness, swirled with that glorious jade. The gown flails around me with a manic intensity, but more ponderously than I can bear. It seems as though whatever had constrained my senses is no longer dragging upon them, but everything else is devoured by that implausible slowing; beauteous blossoms of riotous, multichromatic complexity are now purest nightshade; even the moon is dark, casting a sinister glower of shadow across the land.

"Where are you, _Shego_?" I call out to her, hoping, pleading desperately for her presence; that comforting electric rapture of her embrace, of her reassuring omniscience. She'll affirm that this is assuredly something purely, generically Chinese; as commonplace for them as the passage of an aeroplane overhead, or even a thunderstorm. Curiously, while I have no doubt that I should be overcome with a quaking, shuddering, irrational terror, I am not afraid; I feel nothing but an overpowering serenity, as if I truly belong amid this raging unreality.

Every level, steady footfall draws me nearer and nearer to the pagoda, even as that massive tower, silhouetted in negative against the darkness with the unearthly luminosity pouring in molten streaks from its piercing heights, is nearly blotted out by its own extraordinary aura. With blind eyes, I expertly negotiate the garden, my feet dampened with the black earth; with agonizingly heightened senses, I drift nearer and nearer toward that throbbing core. It fills me with an impossible longing, as if it represents a true nexus with heaven. My heart thunders, my blood roaring with a gale's fury within my temples; fingertips tingle with an electricity that seems truly palpable as it coruscates around me.

At long last, I find myself before the pagoda, but it's barely recognizable to my suddenly overwhelmingly acute gaze; it stands open, the wilted shadow that once devoured it dispelled as if a rank mist by the blazing light that pours from its core. And She stands at its center, consumed in a truly transcendental thrall. My knees threaten to buckle even as I ascend the stout, truncated series of steps that seem to sprawl into infinity; my entire body shivers; a fervent yearning to scream unfathomable, wailing cries of rapture and anguish, of torment and sublimity, seizes my hopelessly arid throat.

The gods that she described aren't merely present in intangible spirit; their shadows ripple and flit across the octagonal chamber, sharply defined vertices flawlessly symmetrical, each host to a toweringly immense, improbable figure of deified humanity. She rests at their absolute core, their shadows converging with impossibly deep seams of darkness through even the light; and yet she seems all the more beautifully illuminated as she stands at bewildering height. And my eyes, so acute as to perceive even the subtlest flicker and flare of light across the pristine and unclouded air, are hopelessly sluggish as I finally realize that her height is not of natural immensity; she rests in midair, comfortably levitating above the icy stone that pulsates with regular, rippling waves of glorious heat.

Her wondrous, onyx tresses whip and flutter around her, serpentine tendrils caressing her bare skin that glimmers with a supernatural jade splendor; her arms extended, her fingers, with singular grace and precision, form elaborate gestures that no human could ever seek to replicate. Those sleek, delicately muscular limbs have begun to shift, as well; with ever escalating alacrity, she seems to dance aloft; but it's not the dance of the morning. In alternation, she turns to each stone figure with eyes of flaring emerald, offering an almost reverential bow in the midst of the dance; a steep inclination of her slim body, a sudden pivot; an elaborate, lurching litany of movements that would be achingly awkward if it weren't for the inhumanly supple grace of her form.

"_Xiannu _Go Xi." That voice emerges of its own volition from my lips, and yet not from my throat; it seems to resonate from an infinite void beyond me, thundering with a courage that I could never hope to manifest through the chamber. "_Xiannu_ Go Xi." I repeat; it repeats, whatever it is. And, at last, she turns, gaze alight with a seething intensity; an almost bewildering clarity, shimmering through even the unbearable luminosity of this temple.

"You've come, at long last." A singularly serene smile that settles upon her black lips. "I've been missing you desperately since the future." Somehow, that impossible phrase seems perfectly rational, knifing through this gauzy disorientation with an unbearable, scalding anguish that sends an excruciating rush of liquid torment through my body. It's as if I'm dying, suddenly crumpling to my knees as though a deflated balloon; a nightmare, shredding stream of breath rips itself from my legs, flooding in a coherent, gossamer torrent into the swirling light.

"Please, don't let me leave you again." I plead, begging with a desperation that I'm hopelessly unable to understand. "Don't let me leave you again."

"Come to me. I missed you before we had even met." And she remains still, even as I struggle to lift myself from this thrall of torture.

"Please! Please!" My words tumble from my mouth; I can taste the sharp tang of blood upon them, my vision blurring as my eyes water with tears that fountain forth, suspended upon the immortal winds.

"Come to me!" Xi Go commands again, and, as I extend a hand to her, a wall of azure fire sprouts from the stone, gripping me in a haze of raw, gnawing misery that devours me until I awaken, an unending scream rising into the scalding caress of the mid-morning sun.

"_Xiannu_ Go Xi! Xi Go! _Shego_!" Those words emerge from my lips before I even understand what I speak. "W-what?" I'm drenched with an agonizing sheen of perspiration, clinging to my bedclothes with a leeching misery that sets every inch of my aching skin alight. I feel as if I've been scalded with it, lifting my hands before my face in search of the blackened, blistered flesh that I discover is merely pink with the tension from clenching them so furiously; infinitesimal dimples stand out in pallid relief from my fingernails.

"_Shego_." I can't repeat any of the words that are now seeping away into my distant memory; they resound through my senses, but I'm unable to grasp them with my conscious mind.

"K-Kimerbly! Kimberly! Are you all right?" I start at Maria's- I presume Maria's- voice reverberating through that stout portal, lurching to an awkward seated position and struggling to discern whether it would be worthwhile to even rise following such a bizarre dream.

"I... I'm fine." Am I? "I'm all right." My voice is miserably hoarse, so I rather suspect that it's unable to carry itself through the robust wood.

"Kimberly! Kimberly! I'm... I'm coming in, all right?" I haven't any answer to her, and the door rattles quietly open, Maria peering demurely through the dark slit that forms; her features are alight with a sudden and spectacular astonishment, rushing to my bedside with eyes agape. "Kimberly!"

"Yes?" I'm a bit bemused at her obviously undue alarm, and consider remarking upon it until the delicate warmth of her palm settles upon my cheek.

"You're hoarse- and you... You look terrible." A thoroughly irate furrowing of my eyebrows at that.

"Excuse me?"

"Are you ill?"

"No." Probably not; a peculiar, lingering delirium continues to shroud my senses, but I've an almost unaccountably electric sense of energy. Rather than the languorous shreds of drowsiness that drift across my sight until I bathe and prepare myself, I've the peculiar certainty of having been awake for hours; that I've merely blinked from a distant moment into this second, with Maria offering me an expression that suggests that I've returned from an expedition with Sir Hillary.

"You... You don't look well, Kimberly."

"What is the matter?"

"Well, um..." Maria departs my bedside for a moment to pluck a mirror, the finely honed, silvered glass inset into a clutching ring of wondrously wrought gold, from the massive table at the chamber's center; returning, she lifts it before my gaze, and I'm overcome by an urge to scream again.

I can barely recognize myself. Though my complexion is ordinarily of a fine milkiness, I seem as pallid as a wraith, as if every semblance of livid color has been drained from my flesh; even my lips are virtually ashen. But, for the briefest of moments, my eyes shimmer with an unreal light before reverting to their tranquil, but weary, emerald; and at that instant, I truly feel as if I've been awake for hours, every semblance of energy draining from my limbs. Even my hair is bewilderingly tousled, as if I've been in the midst of a typhoon, tangled and knotted.

"Oh, my god..." As if I weren't abundantly concerned about appearing positively ridiculous with Xi Go, this arises. "I must not have slept for an hour."

"It's... It's very late, Kimberly. I decided not to wake you, but it's nearly eleven."

"In the morning?"

"Well, yes." Somehow, the notion of a midnight sun doesn't seem entirely implausible; I envision, for an instant, that it would be more natural than the molten glare of the day. A glance beyond the lattice confirms it: the sun's rays are virtually of that pure, shimmering, uninterrupted glower that defines its very zenith, of a clarity that manages to dissipate all but the deepest and most impenetrable shadows of the garden.

"How is that possible?" I drifted away virtually immediately following our meal, when the sun had recently set. I've been maintaining an odd schedule, awakening to the quiet, panting exertions of Xi Go's dance in the mid-morning and gripped by an irrepressible need to immerse myself in those wondrous, surreal dreams that have become ever more intensely realistic as my time in this odd land has grown.

"I don't know, but you should get ready, shouldn't you? For Miss _Shego_, I mean?"

"Yes, I... I suppose that I should." More so than I've ever felt it, that electric ecstasy shudders through me at the mention of her name; I need to see her, to be with her, to feel her presence. "Have you seen her today?"

"No, oddly enough. She might have gone out this morning; I didn't see the driver, either."

"Oh." Peculiarly, I've a sense of unaccountable abandonment at that, as if she's not entitled to even a single hour apart from this home... From me. "What about mother and father?"

"They're... Well, your father went out this morning." My attention is diverted at once from my fervent preoccupation with Xi Go to Maria's transparent evasiveness. Yet again, that guilty and pitiful effort at deception.

"And mother?"

"She... She dismissed me early, and asked not to be bothered by Valentina, either." Another overt untruth, or even a half-truth that barely addresses anything of relevance.

"Oh."

"Perhaps she's simply not adjusting well to the food. I must admit that it seems peculiar, but rather exciting."

"I know." I reply good-naturedly, pondering if Maria truly deserves the icy welter of antipathy and distrust that I can feel flooding through my veins at her casual disingenuousness. "_Shego _and I dined together yesterday evening. It was wonderful."

"Everything is red. It felt like dining upon rubies." An exaggerated smile, Maria extending a hand to me; it's appreciated, every semblance of strength seemingly having been stripped from my aching legs.

"It was beautiful. Everything here is."

"I find myself just sitting in the garden when I'm alone, and when Miss Annette," I haven't heard Maria or Valentina refer to her as 'Miss Annette' unless in the presence of mother's pretentious and class-fixated friends, "Asks nothing of us. I like Shanghai, I think." Yet, her features cloud with a solemn darkness; I notice that her deeply expressive eyes are ringed with black again this morning, her lips still bruised, subtly swollen. It's bizarre that she doesn't refer to Valentina, either; I've never known a single moment in which they've voluntarily separated, much less embraced any measure of solitude.

"Oh." A beat. "Is something the matter between you and Valentina?" A miniature eternity of silence arises in the wake of that question that I hadn't even intended to voice.

"Pardon?" It's as if Maria's been stricken, a sudden, blazing flush reddening her pale cheeks. She politely struggles to restrain the savage scowl that nevertheless creeps along her lips.

"I merely wondered." I feel extraordinarily chastened, as if Maria's an elder sister, rather than someone who's been infuriatingly preserving the distance of a servant.

"Why did you ask that?" Whether with a rage that I've never confronted, or simply an incredible startlement, Maria's voice is raw with a shuddering tremor.

"Well... I've- I've just never known you two to ever be apart. You're... You're inseparable. I suppose I've always thought of you two as being more a single soul in two bodies."

"Well, we're not." A viciously cutting smile that sends my eyes goggling with its manifest bitterness.

"I see."

"Would you like me to help you with your bath, Kimberly?" Her outreaching hand renders it less a question than an order, but I nevertheless nod my assent, slightly unnerved by her sudden, brittle severity.

"Of course." It's my lips' opportunity to brandish an indecently insincere smile as I ponder what precisely is transpiring in my midst. I'd never precisely deluded myself into the belief that I ever lay at the center of my family's affairs, or that I could ever claim an omniscient insight into its events, but this is truly unnerving. It's as if I've truly been imprisoned within some gauzy, delirious vermillion prison, eternally stagnating as life hurtles forward around me. "I... Are you upset about anything?"

"Why?" I'm awestruck by how suddenly, fiercely powerful Maria's grip is; her fingers, slender and fine, pulse with a bewildering, crushing energy that forces a mild, strangled squeak into my throat. Her reply is abrupt, ferocious; she seems nearly mad.

"I," what am I to say in response to that? "I was only worried. You seem a bit... Tired." And she does; exhausted, a mild tremor shivering through her slender shoulders, black-ringed eyes wide with a feral intensity.

"We've just been working a great deal. There are fewer servants here." A strained smile that hardly allays my concerns as I rise to my feet. It occurs to me quite suddenly that my _zanze_, that wondrously elegant gift from Xi Go, is no longer folded to my chest; solely the sodden cotton of the fine Arabian dressing gown separates my grasping hands from my blazing skin.

"Would you like me to help?" I offer earnestly; somehow, the notion of mother's fury at that, whether in the incarnation of a silently fuming scowl or a savage and bitter reprimand, is a glorious prospect.

I don't expect Maria's snide laughter, however; an acid trickle of bitterness in the guise of her otherwise lovely, lilting chuckle, somehow bladed with a savage edge.

"What? What is it? I can't help you, Maria?" I'm not a helpless child; manual labor isn't alien to me, however frail and fine my hands seem. I've aided Vasilevich with decidedly unfeminine tasks in my mother's absence; I've assisted Maria and Valentina with their own chores, even with the selfish motivation of playing sooner with them.

"No, you can't." Her amusement is a lashing utterance of the purest cruelty, and I earnestly feel my palm lifting before allowing it to fall flaccidly to my side. "Not with this, Kimberly."

"What's so different? I helped you and Valentina constantly when you were younger. Don't you remember?"

"Oh, I do." What is the matter with her? For what reason do her eyes flare with such... I force myself not to characterize it as defiance; I'm not her mistress. Why is she behaving so viciously toward me, and why so abruptly? Even then, those auburn pools blaze with an undercurrent of what I'm certain is some shivering, desperately suppressed grief or regret.

"Will you help me with something, then?"

"What is it?" Yes, Maria, I am helpless; somehow, that seems to inspire an unaccountable mirth within her dark eyes.

"_Shego_ gave me a dress yesterday. It's- it's crimson, with these streaks of silver. It's beautiful." And I was resting with it clasped to my chest, and now it's vanished, I don't add; somehow, it seems oddly indecent, and I'm unwilling to mention that to her. The sense of it being possible to entrust her with anything so singularly intimate has vanished.

"Oh." A brief moment of pregnant silence. "Sure."

"It should be here somewhere. I'm so forgetful, I sometimes can't believe it." I force an exaggerated amiability into my voice, as if it's to any avail. Maria glances away, busying herself with scouring the table and the assortment of chests scattered about the chamber while I rifle through my bedding; I finally unearth it beneath the rumpled mass of pallid silk, flawlessly folded as I recall having clasped it to my chest. It glistens radiantly beneath the approaching afternoon sun, a wondrous and flaring perfectly whose supple splendor briefly alleviates the gnawing unease in her presence.

I finally realize what this sensation is with Maria; it's actually a void, an acute awareness of some unbearable, crushing absence. It's a sense of security dissolving amid that bitter antipathy that I can't even begin to understand, as if an insurmountable barrier has simply erupted between us without notice, and without any impetus from me; I've barely even seen her in recent days, however I've wished for her presence.

That's also a lie, isn't it? Perhaps it is my fault: I haven't devoted greater than the slightest kernel of thought to either of the twins, or even my family, much less Vasilevich and the other servants, for days; even then, they seem to drift through my bleary awareness like peripheral stage characters, my attention reserved virtually wholly for Xi Go's luminous presence.

"Here it is." I announce, in the wake of a few tortured, pensive moments.

"Oh, that's good." A slightly noncommittal reply from Maria, who doesn't even turn to me.

"Would you like to see it?" Maria and Valentina adore gorgeous clothing; I've certainly never hesitated to offer them ample opportunity to enjoy mine, however ill-fitting they increasingly have been for them. Those garbs are little more than prosaic rags by contrast with the glorious confection of ruby silk I clutch in my unsteady hands.

"I don't know." Another indifferent shrug. "Would you like your bath?"

"S-sure." It settles onto my bedding with a quiet whisper of fabric, and a muted sigh that I'm unable to restrain. "I suppose that I should."

"You really don't have time, I think, until Miss _Shego_ comes for your lesson."

"Would you like to sit in with us today?" Is that why? I suppose I was horrendously petty yesterday.

"No, thank you, Kimberly." Maria wrenches open my door without any further words, ushering me into the corridor. The resound of our footfalls is unbearably pronounced amid the otherwise still, stagnant silence; an aching thunder that perennially, cruelly accentuates the distance beginning to grow between us. I feel as if I'm mourning for her loss even as she strides beside me; she tugs open the bathroom door, and I barely even notice the almost deliberately casual brush of her fingertips along my spine as I enter before her.

It's remarkable, the total absence of sensation in her presence; no longer that shivering, electric agitation, an inexpressible exhilaration that would send my mind into reeling fits of utter bewilderment, of an inarticulate longing that perpetually threatened to rend my senses into total delirium. Such a caress, even so astoundingly languid and brief, would have driven me virtually mad; and yet, as she begins to unfasten the fine pearl discs binding together the cotton that's become sodden with a perspiration that remains so desperately heated, I can barely feel anything but that aching insecurity. She's no longer Maria; it seems as if nothing that was familiar, that I could actually unconditionally expect, has remained.

It's a bitter epiphany, accentuated with a nearly poetic cruelty as my clothing tumbles away, baring my skin to the arctic and penetrating chill that floods in lashing streams from the tiles whose propitious engravings no longer inspire me with a sense of awe and delight. It's an ambivalent grief; a sense of exchanging a great joy for an unbelievable, wrenching sorrow. I cannot, even now, begin to visualize a return to Paris... Somehow, even the notion of reverting to the comfortable, secure familiarity of Saint Petersburg, of evenings in Ariadne's tender embrace, is hollower than I would ever be willing to acknowledge aloud.

"Are your lessons coming well?" An idle question that shears through that gathering mist of introspective sorrow.

"Pardon?"

"Your lessons with Miss _Shego_? Are they coming well? Or do I still need to help you with your English?" Perhaps she's even become embittered about that, rather than delighting in the scalding flush that their giggles and gentle corrections would inspire with every abysmally ungrammatical struggle at imitating their incredible proficiency.

"They are. She told me the most extraordinary story yesterday." As though she's even listening as she begins to adjust the faucet, a roaring babble of crystalline warmth flooding into the icy basin. Today, I don't even permit it to fill, simply easing into the gathering pool without a further word.

"Did she? I thought that you were studying." No trace of humor, however mordant. She feels nearer to being my mother than Maria; it's that sense of overwrought, shuddering tension, as though she's near to exploding into an uncontrollable fit of rage or grief at every instant. It's peculiar how severely that's intensified since our arrival; mother no longer even seems herself, a sulking wraith consumed with an unpredictable, wrathful aggravation. Whenever I've spoken to her, we've either exchanged terse words about my education- invariably tinged with some unmistakable hatred and resentment toward Xi Go- or she's refused to discuss anything but her expectation for some distant future. She won't even mention father; it's as if he doesn't even exist any longer.

"Well, we were; that was a part of our studies." A solemn and distant smile creeps across my lips as the blazing rapture of the water finally begins to creep along my waist, gradually welling beneath my chest. "If only Natalya Federovna was willing to teach anything so interesting."

"A story?"

"It's Chinese; a great novel, so I understand, about heaven and earth; about love, men, women, and the divine. It's about a great family, whose son is endowed with the spirit of a stone that was granted life after being abandoned by the goddess... Um... _Nuwa_. It's quite remarkable." And it is; it's unlike anything I've ever confronted in the west, particularly the casual and natural interplay amongst the divine and temporal. God and men aren't separate; they mingle and interact, and one can freely become the other. The Taoist and Buddhist that stumble across the stone, even, are of a transcendental power that would be deemed foulest sorcery in Russia.

"That seems blasphemous." My eyebrows furrow at that. Since when has Maria been so preoccupied with what's sacrilegious?

"It's... It's so fantastic, it seems like a dream. That's what its name is: _Red-Chamber Dream_." As if I could hope to pronounce its name in Chinese.

"It sounds interesting, I suppose." Maria appears hopelessly indifferent, her voice filtering through the gossamer shroud that seems to divide us so cruelly. There's no concrete distance, but I feel as if we occupy separate worlds; even separate universes, as though I must shout to be heard through the few paces that divide us more tangibly.

"Would you like to join us, then?" Somehow, even as I feel this throbbing aggravation with her, the grief at being so completely separated from Maria transcends everything else; it's a desperate, quivering need to restore everything to a reasonable normality, as if Maria resuming her patient, silent seat beside me in my governess' lessons will resurrect my familiar life in this alien land.

"I'm sorry, but I truly can't, Kimberly." And what lingering shreds of hope that I'd sought to knit together crumble completely; tears, blistering shards of utter misery, well silently into my eyes.

"Oh. All right, then. Will you ever, though?"

"Hopefully." There's assuredly no expectation in her voice; she seems nearly relieved to be away from me.

"Did I upset you yesterday, Maria?"

"What do you mean?" That icy detachment seems to falter for the briefest of moments.

"Well... I was afraid that I might have been terse yesterday."

"I didn't notice." Another lie, though remarkably effortless as the pale fabric of a washcloth plunges through the rippling surface of the water beside me; as her arms emerge from the liquid heat, sleeves rolled to her elbows, a shimmering layer glimmers faintly atop skin gently blistered with the seething warmth.

"Oh. Well, I was; and I'm sorry." I hasten to add. "I've felt perfectly foolish since then, and I've been so afraid that you were angry with me."

"I truly didn't notice." She dismisses that in a manner that seems so horrendously cruel, as though my gnawing anxiety has just been totally meaningless.

"I see." Following a few moments of silence, disrupted by the quiet rustle of the gently fragrant soap upon the cloth, she begins to massage the lather with deliberate, mechanical motions into my shoulders. My entire body is rigid; there's not even the subtlest trace of that tingling rapture, that exultant delight beneath the ministrations of her hands. It feels nothing like even yesterday, much less those glorious caresses that rivaled even the elation in Ariadne's embrace. There's no longer any semblance of that truly palpable love and intimacy; no longer any suggestion of emotion of any sort. I feel as if she is but my servant, as though she's rejected me as her friend as surely as Meilan had Xi Go.

"Maria?" My shoulders stiffen, my throat suddenly divested of any semblance of moisture as my tongue seems to have emerged from the arid desert.

"Yes, Kimberly?"

"I- I think I'd like to bathe myself today." Her hands freeze, a quiet gurgle of water resounding with the thunderous enormity of a cannon shot as the cloth tumbles from her slackening grasp; I turn to confront eyes simmering with an indecipherable emotion.

"O-oh." It would be trivial if Maria or Valentina hadn't bathed me every day since I was ten years of age; since the moment, it occurs to me in jarring retrospect, that their status as servants became defined, however gently, in opposition to my station as their unwitting mistress. Regardless of how miserably she's behaved toward me in recent days, even I'm astonished by that seemingly benign request that seems a brutal command; a blade that I can already feel lashing through the tattered fabric that barely binds us. Even if I retract it, it simply won't matter.

"I don't feel very well." I explain, pathetically; I expect that she'll silently retire, or even begin to scream at me without restrain, finally relieved of whatever ridiculous delusions of distance my mother's been impelled to foist upon her. I don't expect the roaring slosh of water and the violent slap of miniature waves against my skin as she plunges into the pool beside me, her eyes flaring with a rage that I don't believe I've ever confronted.

"W-what are you doing?" Her clothing is immediately sodden, water rendering the fine fabric virtually translucent with the glimmering light that casts a pure, revealing glare across everything beneath its caress.

"Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" A scalding, frightful heat blazes through my stomach; I feel as if I'll be ill with the fury that whips across me like a knout's savage lash. I've never heard anything like that from her; not merely the profanity, but that incredible and unbelievable anger.

"I... What do you mean?" I'm dazed, barely able to muster anything beyond those few, vacuous words; as if there's any ambiguity as to what she intends.

"What the fuck do you think I mean?" Maria snarls; my dazed mind wonders if she simply intends to kill me. I can feel nothing but hate streaming from her; a furious, unrelenting, and unrepentant hate that sends a shiver through every inch of my skin, even amid the boiling water that seems as if it's cooled to liquid ice.

"W-why are you talking like that to me? What did I do?" My words emerge in a pathetic whisper, my lips trembling as I struggle to discern what lies within that molten anger writhing through her gaze.

"Why, in god's name, are you asking me this? Are you that stupid, Kim?" Somehow, that snaps me from my terror; that despised diminutive that nearly sends my palm lashing out across her cheek.

"What did you call me?" I find myself easing nearer to her, the water rippling around us in sloshing waves.

"Kim. Kim. Kim. Kim. Kim." She chants, glowering down at me as I suddenly become very much aware of that incredible disparity in our height; particularly as I stand unclothed, shivering with rage, her heels lifting her well above me.

"You..." What is the matter with her? I can feel the word 'servant' tugging at my tongue; a demonic presence that gnaws at me, demands that I unleash it like a weapon to completely destroy what few threads survive. "Don't you dare call me that."

"Why? Why can't I, _Kim_?"

"Stop!" I growl, hands balling into fists at my sides. "Stop that, right now!"

"Or what, little mistress? What're you gonna do?" A step toward me; I'm forced to crane my neck to remain focused upon her eyes. "What? Huh?"

"Stop." I repeat. It's a plea and a command uneasily and impossibly coexisting in one word; a plea from her friend and her sister, and a command from her mistress.

"Why? What does it matter?"

"What has gotten into you?"

"I'd ask you that, too."

"What are you talking about?" She's raving; she must simply be crazed. Perhaps there's something in the food; perhaps my delirious dreams stem from that, as well.

"Ever since we came here, it's been a hell."

"W-what? I thought you said-"

"Because you love it here, you idiot." I flare again with rage that I must bite my tongue to contain. "But, I can't take it anymore."

"What's the matter? You don't have anything at all to do, Maria! You can just stay with me; I don't know why you don't!"

"Oh? Oh, you think that, huh?" A brittle and truly insane laugh.

"What, then, do you need to do? What is so bloody hard about tending to my insufferable mother?" Even that obscenity sends a quivering sense of transgression through me.

"You are an idiot." She spits. "_Kim_."

"Take that back. Take it back, Maria." I'm near to screaming, as much with sheer bewilderment as with the hurt and rage that throbs through my breast. "I don't want to fight. I don't even know what this is about." Tears are streaming from my eyes; I can't bear this for a moment longer.

"I will not." There are tears, tiny, prickling points of swimming mist, in hers, as well; but they're angry, embittered, directionless. I feel as if she doesn't even see me any longer.

"I love you." An anguished whisper that lashes at my throat as it's spoken. I do; I've always deeply, intensely loved them. They're my sisters, my friends... Even when we fled, when I craved that uniquely intimate warmth in Ariadne's arms, they soothed me.

"No, you don't." A harsh, gurgling whimper of an answer. "You have no idea what you're talking about." It's as if we're holding two separate conversations that are merely converging with cruel coincidence, with the vaguest parody of understanding.

"I do! I love you, and I love Valentina; you're... You're so important to me. Why can't it be like it was before?"

"You have no idea what that is, Kimberly." An aggrieved, exaggerated shake of her head, braid gouging through the waist-level water.

"What are you talking about? Of course I do, Maria."

"You don't know." An infuriatingly condescending shake of her head, again; that gurgling swimming around her braid that nearly renders me more enraged than those appalling words. "You're still a girl; you don't know what you're talking about."

"Be quiet. I love you and Valentina; I love you like my sisters. You've always been family to me. To everyone. Why are you acting like a spoiled child?" I never believed that I'd confront the hate that flames into her gaze at those words; she clears the distance between us, fingers piercing into my shoulders as she grips me with an unyielding strength, a hideously cruel smile parting her lips. A terror beyond anything I could ever have visualized, eclipsing the deafening stutter of those machineguns on Nevskiy Prospekt, transcending even my most unutterable nightmares, boils through me at the concentrated malice in her expression.

"Family? Family?" A whisper, harsh and hot, that's more shattering than even the most thunderous screams. "You really believe that? Is that what you think, little mistress?" A sinister giggle, almost exaggeratedly feminine; she's oddly, disturbingly beautiful at this moment, a slick, gleaming sheen of perspiration upon her brow. She resembles a demon, flaming with a brutality that seems to ripple and pulse through her very being.

"I love you." I can only whimper that, teeth rattling quietly as I wonder if she will kill me; if she hates me so completely that she'll take my life in this instant.

"Let me show you, little mistress, what that means, then." Her grip intensifies, and I can feel my knees buckling; a faintness of utter terror overtakes me, and I nearly begin to hope for death. The sense that she intends something truly unspeakable for me is horrifically evident; my entire body shivers with a sensation that's so familiar, and yet warped from its blissful exhilaration to complete suffering. Tears are silently trickling across my cheeks, even as her own eyes glisten pitilessly with them; she draws nearer, leaning toward me in a manner that's seemingly drawn from those aching, furtive dreams. With a quiet, shuddering intake of breath, her lips part, mere inches from mine.

"Please... I'm so sorry." I'm terrified, and I barely have the slightest inkling of why; I simply know that I should struggle, that I should wrench away from her, but my feet remain immovably anchored to the slick tiles.

"I know." The molten warmth of her breath whispers across my face; she dips nearer still, hands gliding horrifically across my bare arms with a crackling, sickly electricity.

"Please... Please, don't-"

"Shut up." A savage snarl. "Don't you dare talk to me."

"Please." I beg, again and again; she's frozen as I speak, fingernails knifing excruciatingly into my flesh. "Please. Please; I'll do anything. I'm so sorry."

"Stop talking." She orders; I'm overcome by an urge to submit, but I know that it will hardly mollify her. On a certain, visceral level, I feel as if that's what separates me from whatever cruel depredation she intends for me.

"No. I- I want to tell you how much I love you, Maria. Please. I love you so much, and-" Her hand snaps against my cheek like a stone; I'm rigid, still, unable to shift or even lift my palm to that sudden welter of throbbing agony. Her chest heaves, ragged pants torn from her throat as she stares at me, her fingers trembling beside my face.

"I hate you." Those words emerge as a sob, and she vaults from the water, dense, fat droplets bursting across the tiles as I sag to my knees, gasping moans of purest anguish flooding from my lips. I barely even recognize them as mine; they're animal, wailing whimpers, intensifying as I fold my arms around my chest. The pain continuing to scour across my cheek is simply insignificant by contrast with that throbbing hell rending through my heart; it feels as if I'm dying, and I'm nearly prepared to drown myself as a startling rapping issues from the robust door.

It repeats itself, again and again, and I wonder if it's simply a cruel joke from Maria to force me from the water.

"Kimberly?" It's Xi Go's voice, echoing with a calm and quietude that seems virtually exaggerated in the wake of that rending terror. "Kimberly? Are you still in the bath? It's- it's time for our lesson." A beat. "I saw Maria come out, but are you still there?"

Silence reigns; I'm fervently hoping that she'll simply wander away, weary of addressing a mere specter. I wish that I could fade into an invisible wisp, evaporating wholly from this tortured plane with the sun's caress.

"Kimberly? Do you need any help? I'll come in if-"

"No!" That seems to explode from my very soul, a desperate plea for her not to subject me to any further torment. I can barely tolerate merely existing at this second; the notion of being in her bewitching presence, unable to perceive even the subtlest trace of that beautiful, tingling electricity with this welling of grief, seems truly lethal. "I'm- I'm all right." The ragged, hoarse quiver of my voice is hardly persuasive, but the door doesn't creak open.

"Well, all right... I'll, um... I'll be waiting outside for you. Is that fine?"

"Of course." That effort at nearly a hyperbolic composure is absolutely idiotic; I simply seem all the more panicked.

Adrift in that desolate pool, serpentine coils of steam rising from its surface, I shiver with the recession of that liquid terror; I can barely register that heat, my eyes falling to the rippling wavelets that whisper across my legs. I've a glimpse of my reflection, distorted and shimmering; my lips warped into a tortured grimace, my eyes wide and ringed with darkness; even the lingering crimson contours of Maria's palm upon my cheek. My lips quiver, and I begin to weep, finally, truly; harsh, ragged, sobbing cries. I don't even care if they reach Xi Go's ears; I don't care about anything, settling into an awkward seated position, lacing my arms around my knees.

"Why?" Yesterday, everything seemed utterly magical; even with Maria's odd deception, that splendor was simply overpowering. Now, I'd surrender nearly anything to return to what it had been. "Why?" I love Maria and Valentina; I particularly love Maria. Though they've been inseparable, I've always felt slightly nearer to her; and that has grown deeper and deeper with the progression of years. She's beautiful; her eyes seem to entrance me with the slightest glance, and I feel as if, in her presence- as with Ariadne-, I'm nearly living those sweeping romances.

Now, however...

"Kimberly?" Xi Go calls out again; I don't bother answering. I can't vanish from the bathroom, however appealing a prospect it would be to disappear completely.

My tears curl along the contours of my cheeks, pattering mutely into the bathwater. It's a struggle to fish the cloth from the basin's depths, plucking from the tiles with quaking fingers the slick, pallid disc of soap that inspires an immediate, molten swelling of renewed grief. Her slim digits have engraved shallow tracts into it, and that awareness that she'll never be so near to me again, that she'll never forgive me for some ridiculous transgression... That she'll never love me again resurrects those horrid, rending sobs.

There's no joy in bathing myself; no excitement, no warmth, no tingling, feminine delight and intimacy that her caress inspired so wondrously. There's nothing but a level, mechanical stroke of the rag that feels as abrasive as if it were woven from serrated steel; the delicate caress of the perfume is the foulest stench, and my tears continue to flow without abatement, scalding my cheeks and rendering my eyes achingly raw.

"Kimberly?" Again, Xi Go calls out to me. I have no answer, submerging myself in wondrously crystalline waters that may as well be a turbid cesspool. It sluices through my hair, seeming to weave through every individual tendril, before I rise, coughing and shivering, from the swollen warmth. I'm not Ophelia; and it occurs to me with a sudden, crushing swell of emotion, rage and grief, that she shouldn't be the one to be so furious. I haven't rejected Maria; I haven't been so callous and awful as Meilan. I haven't done anything.

And, yet, my body continues to throb with an unbelievable anguish; my lips tremble; my eyes add to the sheen of water clinging to my cheeks. Stumbling from the water, I feel as if I'll topple onto the decorative tiles; as it is, I somewhat wish that I could merely curl upon them and slumber until this day passes away into distant posterity. I don't wish to remember anything; I can't bear the thought of Maria's beatific gaze suddenly consumed with that seething fury, her hands upon my body and her lips so near to mine in the most hellish parody of those wondrous dreams that have continued to visit me.

A towel lies, long forgotten, upon the porcelain stoop beside the bath, and I swaddle myself within it, shivering with such intensity that I'm concerned the chattering of my teeth will be heard through the door.

"Kimberly? Are you all right? I'm a bit worried."

"I'm..." Am I fine? Wasn't I pleading for Xi Go to be nearer to me? Wasn't I yearning for... For that intimacy, that divine warmth that I'd felt so powerfully with Ariadne?

"Do you mind if I come in?"

"No." I finally answer, wondering how deeply I'll regret it as the knob unleashes a quiet squeal that seems a frightful punctuation to a likely horrible decision. The black aura of her lovely raven locks materializes, followed by the pallid beauty of her features as she peers through the slightly parted portal. Her expression, contorting from vague concern into utter horror, confirms how utterly pathetic I am; that she rushes to my side with almost supernatural haste is a further affirmation of that. Her dress is remarkably similar to the glorious gown that she bestowed upon me, and akin to her own yesterday, albeit a deep and virtually unfathomable navy seamed with striations of black thread.

"Kimberly! My god... Are- are you all right? What's wrong?" Kneeling beside me, unconcerned by the glinting pool into which her fine silk gown is dipping, her hands elicit a fearful shiver as they fall upon my own. Xi Go's solemn eyes narrow further, her slender fingers lifting my gaze to her own.

"Nothing." I lie, pathetically. Those sloe pools seem to rage like an ocean churned into a froth, her jaw strained as she studies me; it's as if she's simply peering into my mind, not even bothering with the niceties of a suitably maternal interrogation.

"Don't lie to me." She finally concludes. Her gaze briefly flickers to my shoulders, and then to my arms; my own eyes follow that questioning stare, discovering the reddened gouges carved by Maria's fingers beginning to blacken into sullen bruises. "What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Who hurt you, Kimberly?" Words that lash as cruelly at me as Maria's slap. I can't bear to acknowledge it. It feels as if refusing to accept those images that continue to spiral through my mind, rejecting them completely, will simply erase those horrid few minutes from reality.

"N-no one. It's nothing."

"Don't lie to me, Kimberly." Her words are delivered with a remarkable intensity; I feel like a child, which is probably what I am in her presence. "Don't lie to me."

"I'm not-"

"You are lying. I can feel that." Her eyes, I'm certain, have lightened a bit; they're less gentle, however, a familiar jade radiance seeming to creep into that lovely darkness. "So, don't lie."

"Then, please..."

"Please, what?"

"Don't tell anyone." Whatever Maria's motives, I couldn't bear the thought of losing her. There must be something dreadfully the matter with her, but I love her; I don't want her to leave.

"Was it one of the servants? Was it Chang?" What?

"W-what are you talking about?"

"You're terrified- you're shaking." I am; I've little doubt of that, but I don't quite understand what she intends. "I... I can feel this odd sensation from you." She can feel it?

"No, it wasn't Chang. It wasn't any of the Chinese, or... Or a servant. Maria- she was just angry with me." I'm struggling to dismiss it, forcing a ridiculously feeble-minded grin upon my lips.

"So, she hurt you?" She's not smiling in return; she seems enraged, a palpable fury boiling from her in throbbing waves.

"Well, I-"

"Did she hurt you?"

I have no reply.

"Did she hurt you?" The forceful composure has begun to melt away from her voice; a severe, flinty edge begins to surface. "Did she hurt you, Kimberly?"

"She hit me. B-but, it was my fault-"

"I see." Xi Go no longer seems to be listening to me. "And she grasped you, yes?"

"Just... She was angry. She hasn't seemed like herself since coming here. She's very nice; she's like a sister to me."

"As you told me."

"Please, don't tell my parents about this. They'd be perfectly furious, and-"

"As you wish." The strain drawing taut Xi Go's features refuses to relax, however. "As you wish."

"You're angry with me, too." It's an abrupt and excruciating epiphany, rising with a fear that she'll hate me as completely as Maria now does. "It's because I'm as dreadful as Meilan, and-"

"I'm not angry with you. I'm just confused, Kimberly, and... I'm very, very confused." She settles beside me upon the icy porcelain. "What are you talking about?" She finally asks, following the passage of a few uneasy seconds.

"Because of how terribly I acted toward Maria. You must," a sniffle ruptures my speech, "You must believe I'm an aristocratic beast. But I'm not. I'm really not."

"I didn't think that at all." I can't even hear her, beginning to weep again, that fruitless facade dissolving while I wonder what's to become of me, now; pondering a future in which even Xi Go will have rejected me, even as Maria and Valentina refuse to acknowledge me as anything but an odious burden. "Kimberly?"

"You'll hate me, too, won't you?" I must be mad, sobbing uncontrollably into my palms, not even caring that the towel has tumbled away from my skin, numb with this shattering grief and the leeching chill. "You'll hate me!"

"Kimberly, I..."

"You'll hate me, and you'll leave me. I don't want to be all alone again. I don't want you to leave me. I don't want it to be like leaving- leaving Russia again! I don't want to feel that again!" My voice has risen from a low, wracking sob to a scream of unbearable agony; I can already feel that again, that desolation, that torment that hollowed away my soul. I wept for months into my pillow in that horrid Parisian mansion, praying to awaken again beside Ariadne in Smolniy; and the second that my grief has seemed to recede, that I... That I feel almost complete again, god robs me of relief.

I must deserve it; mother's disapproving glares must have meant something. The whispers of the other girls about some dreadful transgression, that odd, shivering heat in my breast... That must have been a message. "I'm cursed." I finally conclude, any further words reduced to nothing but screams that I struggle to stifle with my palms.

"I am." Those words sheer through this hellish haze of grief as I feel her arms fasten around me with a nearly crushing pressure. She drapes me with her heat, that fragrant and tender warmth that feels so indescribably singular. It's not merely her arms; her body envelops me, her slender, willowy limbs and the enormous, perfumed curtain of her locks that blot out the blinding, stark glare of this room.

My eyes can finally close, and I nestle against her, weeping into the silk through which her heartbeat throbs. It feels as if that level rhythm is leading me away from some unseen but acutely felt precipice; I can't concentrate upon anything but her pulse, even as wracking cries continue to tear themselves from my chest.

"But, you're not cursed, Kimberly... There's nothing cursed about you." I can't answer that; I can't even force myself to speak. It's as though the palpitations of her heart are strangling every word, forcing me to concentrate upon that wondrous, even throb, joined by the quiet, tender rush of her breath that reminds me of waves crashing upon the distant surf.

"I don't know what happened today, but I can't..." This is one of the first moments when I've had the sense that she's truly, deliberately weighing her words. "I don't know what I should think. I can't tell you to be angry with her; I can't expect you to reject her, even if you should."

"I love her." I finally am permitted to speak.

"I know that." Her lips, full and warm, rustle through my damp and matted hair.

"She's my sister; I love her that strongly. She's... She's family." And, yet, that doesn't quite seem complete; it doesn't quite capture what I've felt, what seemed so peculiarly confirmed by that terror, that sense of... Of betrayal in her savage grip. "But, I was so afraid with her. I didn't think that I ever could be."

"What did she do, Kimberly?" Her voice caresses me in an odd stereo, reverberating from within her chest even as it filters so mellifluously, encouragingly, through my ears.

"I don't know, really." The physical pain, however bruising, seems minor by contrast with that indescribable fear.

"Pardon?"

"I don't know how to tell you. She- she scared me."

"How?" An acid knot of dread and frustration forms in my stomach at her prompting.

"I... I asked her not to bathe me today, and she just became so angry. She leapt into the water beside me, and started screaming at me as if I'd... I'd betrayed her."

"For that alone?"

"Maybe I hurt her yesterday. I- I was terse; I shouldn't have been."

"She hit you for that?"

"Well, she... She screamed at me, and I was so scared; I was trembling, and angry, and then she just... Hit me. She took hold of me; I felt her so close, and I was begging for her to stop. I told her, again and again, how much I love her, and she just didn't seem to hear me. It was like I was talking and she couldn't even hear."

"What happened?" Another patient prod.

"I..." A flush of unbelievable, unaccountable shame flares through me at the thought of telling her anything, of recounting even a fraction of those odd and horrifying emotions that I felt in her grasp... As she came so near to me; as I felt her breath upon my cheek, or her lips so near to mine. "I don't know." I answer lamely. "She just left."

"Oh." I don't care if she knows that I'm lying. She doesn't seem eager to force anything further from me, however.

"That's terrible, Kimberly."

"I know." It is; I already miss Maria. I just wish that I had some inkling of what could possibly be the matter with her, of why she would lash out so brutally at me. "I do love her."

"Like a sister, as you told me."

"I- I think so." And, yet... "Do you mind if I tell you something that I've never told anyone?"

"What do you mean?" She seems, if anything, a bit bemused.

"About my best friend."

"Maria?"

"N-no." Perhaps she has been, however, since departing from Russia. "Her name is Ariadne."

"Ariadne? The woman that guided Theseus through the labyrinth?"

"Yes." Somehow, that seems oddly appropriate. "She... She was my best friend in Russia; I loved her so much."

"I... I see."

"We were students together at Smolniy. It's- it's only girls there. I don't know what schools are like in China." An odd serenity seeps into my words, even as a mild shiver flits through my body in Xi Go's arms. I feel absolutely exhausted, scoured of every semblance of emotion, from this; but it's a peculiar sense of liberation, as well, as if I can now speak completely without restraint, without concern for anything.

"Well, girls don't attend school, actually... But, please, continue."

"She and I were inseparable; literally. Even when we were away for vacation, we were always together. I didn't... I didn't feel complete without her; it as was if, for that time, she held a part of my soul, and I couldn't be myself without her presence." Xi Go doesn't reply, but I haven't the sense that she's judging me. "We even shared a room together. I... I loved her so much, even if mother was so angry to see us together."

"Angry?" A deliberately mild reply, as if she also understands mother's aggravation.

"I don't know about angry, exactly, but... I always had this sense that she disapproved when we held hands, or when we would embrace. It just felt so natural to me, and to her. We slept together at night, when it was so bitterly cold in the dormitories; it was perfect, feeling her warmth totally consume me." Perhaps I'm simply soothing myself with those memories, though Xi Go's own extraordinary heat seems to blaze more powerfully than those remembrances that are beginning to flow ever further from my immediate grasp. "Do you understand?"

"I felt much like that with Meilan." Again, that odd, level neutrality in her voice, as if she's afraid of betraying any emotion.

"I loved her, just like I love Maria and Valentina, but... Sometimes, it was even stronger; almost like the love they describe in those romances. We even talked about that, how- how it would seem much, much better for us to spend a life together adventuring, rather than being some dull aristocrat's doting wife. Sometimes, I..." I can't bear to complete that sentence; I've barely been able to acknowledge it to myself, much less utter those words. Sometimes, enveloped in that breathless embrace, in those interminable, tender silences, feeling her so near to me... It seemed so natural to close that aching distance between us, to feel the warmth of her lips against mine.

"I understand." Xi Go isn't lying; I know this with an iron certainty as that unyielding levelness dissipates. "I do understand."

"But, with the Revolution... We left; I'm sure that Ariadne and her family left, as well. I haven't ever seen her. I was so alone; I felt like..." My voice dips to a slightly uneasy whisper. "Like Penelope, wondering if she were all right... If she were even alive. And I wasn't able to think about anything but her, just wishing that everything could be as it was, even if the Tsar didn't exist; I didn't care. But, we've been away for... For three years now; and I just felt that ache turn to this hopeless hollow.

"And I started to feel so close to Maria; sometimes, even... Even what I felt with Ariadne. And, now, today, I... I don't know." A lengthy span of silence as I struggle to resolve my jumbled thoughts. "Is it that complicated in China?"

"Yes, and no." Such a cryptic and nonsensical reply.

"I don't understand." I truly can't; and not solely that obviously bewildering answer.

"In China, women... Perhaps they're much like they are in Russia, and in Europe; they're expected to be their husbands' property, unless they're truly exceptional. And, then, I understand, European women are disdained and denigrated as being... Aberrant, regardless of their wants." I can perceive the uneasy smile upon her lips against the peak of my head. "In China, women simply do not exist as individuals; they remain children throughout their entire lives. They're their father's daughter, and then a husband's wife; even the cruelest of mothers-in-law are still slave to the whims of their husbands."

"Can't they choose not to be?"

"No." A stern nod. "At least, most cannot. Even in the story that I've told you, you can see that; Lady Jia is still a wife, and those women that Baoyu loves as pure and transcendental are still only women."

"Are they..." The question forms haltingly, with aching pensiveness as I struggle to even conjure the words to quite describe those emotions and jumbled thoughts. "Are they allowed to be so close? As Ariadne and I were?"

"No one speaks of it." Such a simple and direct answer that resolves nothing.

"But, would your mother have... Have acted as if you were behaving..."

"Sinfully?" I have the odd inkling that Xi Go understands more of that than I quite grasp; as though there's something deeper and more powerful that explains the sheer enormity of that emotion, of those bewildering sensations. "I do not know. No matter what, of course, you must be wed when the moment arrives; your wants are irrelevant."

"I know." A dismal, aching swallow. "I know that. I don't want that moment to ever come."

"Do you still miss Ariadne?" And my mind begins to reel again with a hellish babel of innumerable, clashing thoughts. A swell of molten, blazing guilt at the thought of being... Being untrue; that's the only possible description of it... Clashes with an aching awareness of that distance, of the miserable cooling of those hot emotions and quivering, unspoken delights.

"I don't know." I truly don't. I miss her, yes, but... Perhaps not as I had. And I feel abhorrent for that.

"_Shego_." I can't bear my own yammering, self-recriminating thoughts that menace me with utter madness as they whirl again and again around me in a circular torment. Ariadne isn't with me; there's nothing that can be done, and yet I can't overcome the sense that it shouldn't matter. Is this merely friendship, or sisterhood? It feels so much more powerful; the guilt shouldn't be this intense from a mere loving companionship.

"Yes?" Her voice is remarkably deep, contemplative; I realize that her lengthy, well-honed nails have begun to glide languorously across my skin. The awareness of that sends rippling, coruscating arcs of that familiar electric excitement through me, but all the more powerfully. I'm suddenly so powerfully conscious of my nakedness in her arms; of her warmth enveloping me, the silken caress of her wondrous, raven mane against my bare flesh. The thought that she might not notice that, even as she may be pondering Meilan, or even my life with Ariadne, is almost achingly awful; that this seething thrall might exist solely within my own mind, thundering through my nerves alone.

"I had such an extraordinary dream." She stiffens, subtly but perceptibly.

"Oh?"

"You were... You were there; you were in the garden, worshiping the gods of the pagoda. And I knew your name; I could actually speak it." Those images begin to spiral through my mind again, but with such impossible vividness; the curious jade cast of her bare flesh; the blazing emerald haze that boiled from her, that seemed to flare from within her smolderingly intense eyes.

"I see."

"_Xiannu_." I feel a sickly sheen of startled perspiration flush across my skin at the realization that I've spoken that word again; the pitch and tone are perfect, even though my voice isn't quite my own.

"Kimberly..." I don't believe that I've ever heard such unease manifest in that lovely, melodious voice.

"I feel that it wasn't a dream."

"Kimberly..." Again, that uneasy murmuring of my name.

"I felt as if I'd known you for my entire life, and you knew me."

"I..."

"I feel it still, _Shego_." Somehow, that pronunciation of her name persists in eluding me as infuriatingly as that unearthly sensation that nonetheless continues to throb through my body.

"Take my hand, Kimberly." Suddenly, bathing me again in the ferocious, bitter chill boiling from the tiles, she rises, her slender hand extended to me. "There is much that you do not know."


	5. Breath

"Take my hand." Xi Go repeats; I find myself anchored to the frigid stoop, bound by a sudden and unutterable fear that's nearly a tangible weight in its immensity. It's not a terror that I've ever confronted, save for within the gauzy and delirious embrace of that impossible dream that seemed so impossibly real; a horror that invokes a shearing, unendurable sense of longing and loss, of a molten azure flame that dances cruelly across my sight.

"I-"

"Take my hand, Kimberly." A tender smile parts lips that, even beneath the divine caress of the midday sun filtering through the chamber, are black; that gentleness floods with an ever-growing, liquid splendor through a gaze that's no longer such a mild sloe. There is no further explanation or command from Xi Go; time would seem frozen if it weren't for the icy misery that's wreathing me, or the languorous, rhythmic rise and fall of her chest.

"_Shego_-" I'm terrified; I've the sense that I stand at a precipice, blinded, and that she expects me simply to heave myself without further thought into it.

"Please. There is nothing that I can tell you, Kimberly; nothing that can be said... Understanding isn't with words; it cannot be."

And I take her hand; it's an instant, intuitive decision, virtually instinctual, even as everything that I recognize to be myself screams for me to refuse. It's as though there's another aspect of my existence, a spirit beyond the conscious mind that is Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym; deeper, more powerful, shivering through my very being in a welter of certainty that doesn't extend to my waking self. It feels a great deal like the vague, nebulous persona of my dreams; of feral violence and seething emotion; of an eternal, rapturous thrall of sensations and power beyond any comprehension.

Everything seems to awaken into darkness; as if I'm resurrected from a death that had escaped my awareness, or simply reborn, a curtain of blazing ebon plunging over my senses. I truly am blind, I realize, even as that blackness adopts a shuddering definition of its own; an odd certainty and form amid the nothingness, unfolding within the void. The sensation evaporates as my eyes open again with a furious, hitching breath that scours savagely at my lungs. It's as if I've been drowning in an ocean of acid, wracking coughs continuing to ravage my blisteringly hypersensitive nerves while I tremble and whimper.

Her hand is no longer in my grasp; there no longer is that wondrously delicate, electric caress of her slender fingers. I discover myself in her embrace, her slim arms woven around me with a singular intimacy, a familiarity that I realize now that I've craved in a manner that words and thoughts could never quite capture; that solely experiencing that again could allow me to grasp the void that I now know has gnawed unremitting at me since the moment that my once sightless gaze fell upon her.

"_S-Shego_... It... I hurts so badly. It hurts. Oh, my god... It- the pain..." I can barely complete a single sentence in the throes of such convulsive, throbbing torment; it's growing with every instant, blooming as if some malign flower through my body. That leeching acid anguish is minor against the hell that's now unfolding. My limbs lash out with a desperate, manic ferocity; my head thrown back, a nightmare, inarticulate warble floods from my suddenly parched and raw throat; a sanguine, copper bitterness begins to seep from my ruptured lips.

"Please, Kimberly..." She soothes me, but I don't understand what she asks of me; it's as if words truly are of no use, even as her powerful, startlingly lengthy arms restrain me. "Please... Please, awaken."

"I..." The pain refuses to recede; it's eternally growing, a feral dragon that writhes across every nerve, shredding and mending with molten thread every muscle. I feel as if every inch of my body is being diligently torn asunder by something within me, even as my mind reels with a tormented disorientation. "I..." Who am I? What am I? I can't even hope to approach something so simple. It occurs to me that I barely even know, that I can hardly aspire to answer that for myself.

"Kimberly... I'm so sorry." Such a tortured resignation; a flare of rage begins to ripple from the deepest reaches of my spirit. It's such a savage and callous sense of abandonment, as though I've failed her and she's casting me away with nothing but those words.

"No!" She starts, her arms tensing around me for an instant. "No!" The anguish has begun to recede, gently and unrelentingly; I realize that I can't bear for it to vanish. "Don't stop!"

"Kimberly-"

"No!" That spirit within me is raging again, forcing itself through my straining lips as bitter tears carve across my cheeks. As that wave of suffering subsided, only a hollow nothingness lay in its wake; I won't endure that again.

"It's too much, Kimberly. I can't watch you-"

"No! No! No! No!" And it returns with an renewed intensity, precisely as I demand, even as I plead for it to end. "Don't stop this." My words are a furious hiss from the very depths of my raw and ragged lungs, drawing breath until I feel as if I'll drown upon the air itself. It occurs to me that I'm no longer even breathing beyond a certain point; that palpitating throb is too terribly intense for my body to bear, but it's so achingly, impossibly cool. The pain is gradually declining, as if eroded with every non-breath; it's an extraordinary sense of what I could only describe as void.

My screams rise in pitch when my chest finally stills; it's no longer so unutterably torturous to wail a pain that seems greater for the unaccountable grief that's rending my spirit. It's death; death upon death upon death, spiraling through a cavernously hollow eternity. I sob and shriek, feeling my life end, salved by every rebirth and crushed into deeper torture by that inevitable demise again. I feel a heat beyond compare throb through my breast; even through the endless cycles of life, of the blossoming tenderness of spring and the cruel embrace of winter, that endures, blazing beauteously. It, I realize, is of indescribable familiarity; a wondrous, blooming rapture that I've borne within me for ages.

Tender smiles, a blushing, awkward beauty; the delicate interlacing of fingers, of bodies... A quiet hitching breath; the swell of my chest against another's. The whole of those images, of those glorious sensations, arise amid that deeper sensation; it underlies everything, permeating my very soul, defining it with such an aching intensity.

In her arms, it's as if I'm achieving an impossible completion, hurtling inexorably toward some familiar but utterly alien destination. My senses ripple and jolt with impossible contortions; explosions of impossible color, virtually becoming tangible in their intensity, juxtaposed against desolate monochrome; unspeakable agony intertwining with the most singular bliss; total emptiness joining utter fulfillment.

And it's as if she's released me, suddenly starving me of that impossible transcendence as I rise to its apex. Falling, tumbling, crying out in unfathomable torment that sends a rending, howling shriek thundering from my lips. At the moment at which I felt as if my eyes were opening, revealing in flawless, clarified detail the whole of my reality; at the instant that it seemed as if those disparate, divided fragments of my soul were rejoining, fused with the molten intensity of this ecstatic thrall; at the second that I was certain that I would attain what could only be described as enlightenment, it's wrenched away from me. My vision writhes and reality distends, tears swimming before my gaze as my eyes- my physical eyes- snap open.

The deepest, most all-enveloping hell that my darkest and most torturous dreams could conjure hardly compares with this; the sense that I've been deprived of what is rightfully, truly my own, even as it drifted so near to my grasp after what my mind realized must have been an eternity. My lungs blaze with an unutterable torment, every nerve alight with a screaming, ragged and wholly _ordinary_ suffering that's simply been escalated to extremes that I could never envision. A furious, wracking cough shears through my chest; it feels as if I haven't drawn breath for years, my lungs suddenly spasming with a cringing need to breathe.

And I do; bitter, frigid air rushes through them, my agonized throat crying out in protest with every indulgence of that visceral need that I'm certain I should have discarded. I see her above me, that raven curtain shrouding us; a sense of unaccountable intimacy, of the fading specter of some glorious and transcendental dream, lingers, even as the thoughts and sensations that were once so palpable drift away from my grasp.

"_Shego_." My first word is her name, my parched and tormented lips struggling to form it. "Why?" Is my second; it seems an accusation.

"You weren't strong enough, Kimberly. Not yet." I don't understand, and yet it seems perfectly reasonable; that niggling shard of some other soul impels me to nod with a resigned understanding.

"W-what happened?" That spirit recedes again, shattering what tenuous grasp that I could maintain upon whatever had afflicted me with such violence. "M-my god... It... It hurts, _Shego_."

"I know. I know." An achingly delicate whisper as her slim fingers begin a languorous caress across my forehead; it's stained with a seething patina of perspiration, acid and almost unbearable in its immensity. Stout, agonizing droplets roll along it, pattering across the tiles with a damp, rattling cadence. Xi Go supports me upon her lap, my spine braced upon the remarkably pliant warmth of her legs as my feet droop upon the tiered steps; it blearily occurs to me that we probably resemble those portraits of the Madonna.

"W-what's wrong with me? Why is it so painful? Am I ill?" It feels as if I am, though I can't quite decide where that affliction lies.

"No. No, you're not ill." The shake of her head is accentuated by the drifting flutter of her sleek and downy tresses against my blazing cheeks. I'm astonished by the luminous halo that envelops her, illuminating her delicate features, even amid this peculiar blackness. "You'll be fine. I promise you, Kimberly."

"What happened?" I repeat, gradually regaining control of the violent whirl of thoughts careering through my dazed mind. Everything that's arisen since the instant I felt her hand close upon mine, reaching out to her despite the shivering terror that coruscated through me, has seemingly evaporated from my remembrance; merely the vaguest sense of memory connects those events, a fragile and indistinct thread that links that sudden, electric thrall and this moment of almost unearthly tranquility.

"You were struggling to remember, Kimberly." Remember what? It feels as if every semblance of that bizarre jumble of thoughts and sensations, that odd sense of connection with the surreal contents of my dreams, has dribbled away with my scalding sweat across the icy porcelain beneath us.

"What was I trying to remember?"

"Everything." Another answer that resolves absolutely nothing. She speaks with the utmost patience, however, despite the uncanny sense that I should know this; that her replies should simply speak to some fundamental knowledge that must lie at the very core of my being.

"I... I don't understand." With what feels a herculean effort, I succeed in wrenching one leaden arm from its pathetic, drooping listlessness upon the arctic tiles; easing through the weighty shroud of Xi Go's hair, I release it again upon my brow, discovering how horridly deathly the chill that's permeated my body is. Solely my face seems warm; it's ablaze, feverish, further exacerbating the feeble quivers that ripple through me. "I don't feel well."

"I know. It's- it's cold here, Kimberly." It's never been so overwhelming.

"The... The bath." I suggest, though she's since risen without the subtlest challenge, holding me aloft in her embrace as if I'm truly weightless. Xi Go doesn't bother to conceal her transparent strength; her slender arms are perfectly still, not even the minutest suggestion of tremor or strain within the sleek muscularity.

"Are you certain?"

"Please." It's rather surreal to feel myself being lowered into that miniature ocean like a child, the blistering surface lapping at my fragile flesh with a volcanic fury. I can't suppress a gasp of startlement and a quiet mewl of pain that nonetheless achieves a fluid and glorious transformation to a whimper of utter ecstasy as I adjust to the heat. It devours my arms, sluicing around my legs; she's gradually kneeling, the smoldering kiss of the water sloshing against my rear and spine, finally consuming me wholly in an embrace that inspires a rapturous sigh.

I realize that she's continuing to support me within the water; it's an oddly infantile sensation, as though I'm in the midst of being baptized. A few errant locks droop into the crystalline pool, the water threading gracefully through that raven splendor as her shimmering gaze remains unyieldingly fixed upon me. My own eyes seem to be struggling for purchase upon anything but that luminous splendor, a deepening lividness creeping across my cheeks with the sheer intensity of her stare. With a subtle shift of my shoulders, she seems content to release me; a peculiar sense of displacement and an awkward flail of my exhausted limbs culminates in my finally righting myself, my chin barely above the water's surface as I settle into a weary slump.

"Take my hand." That emerges as a desperate plea from me. I've been pining for that embrace at every instant, for the renewal of that wondrous, electric intimacy, but I've never been quite so powerfully emboldened. Now, I've the sense that death will overtake me if I'm deprived of that for a moment further. Xi Go doesn't hesitate, grasping the damp flotsam that I barely manage to heft above the pool's crushing embrace.

"Kimberly... Are you all right?" It somehow seems a patently ludicrous question. If it weren't for the aching tenderness and frightful gravity of her voice, I'd be unable to overcome the sudden and overpowering compulsion to laugh flaring into my bleary brain.

"I feel so bizarre. So peculiar." I do; there's simply no other description. Nothing could quite capture the sheer enormity of this sensation, this utter, gnawing certainty that something of absolutely singular import to me lies beyond the impenetrable, hazy curtain of flawed memory. It's doubly excruciating with the sense that I had seized those answers, and that they'd been cruelly torn from me at that final instant of epiphany.

"Do you?" A curiously mild query, as if I hadn't been convulsing in her embrace.

"I do."

"How?" Such caution, as though fearful of what she may reveal with too terribly forceful or direct a question.

"I..." As I stir within the water's molten grasp, pivoting awkwardly to glance at her, it occurs to me that I can't quite answer; I haven't the slightest inkling. "I don't know what to say."

"Please, tell me what you feel."

"I..." Again, that torturously elusive sensation. "I feel so unusual, as I said. It's as though I'm not quite myself any longer, but I couldn't possibly be anyone else. My entire body feels almost crushingly heavy, though; like lead. But as light as a feather." A bizarre contradiction, but I discover that those sensations somehow manage to invert themselves with a nearly spiteful abruptness as my mind falls upon them. Illustratively, I lurch effortlessly from the water, relieved of a titanic burden that weighed truly tangibly upon me; stout droplets stream from my fingertips, hammering a quiet tattoo onto the surface. "And I'm in so much pain that I can barely feel it. I'm so exhausted that it's as if I'm filled with an impossible strength." A beat. "It just all seems to be contradictions." And, with that, I sag again, exhausted, into the pool, as if that sudden, jarring realization shredded away what energy arose with such awareness.

"Exactly." A supremely cryptic reply caresses my drowsy senses, my eyes, massively lidded and unendurably weighty, beginning to droop closed of their own accord.

"I- I don't understand." That emerges as an almost incoherent slur of syllables.

"You will, Kimberly. You will; I promise you that."

"How?" How can she be so certain?

"I'll teach you, as I have." A brief, pensive moment. "Do you still trust me?"

"Yes." I offer her an eager, almost desperately reassuring nod. "Yes. More than I ever have. I... I don't know what it is, but I feel as if I could only trust you."

"You should rest, Kimberly." Her palm settles upon my brow, soothing me as if a child, though it occurs to me that I could never have experienced such a lurching excitement within my breast as a child.

"I-"

"Please, rest. I will awaken you early tomorrow; we have much to do."

"I..." Any further protest is stymied by the merest of caresses across my cheek, before her smile sends my mind tumbling into blackness.

"Kimberly?" Perhaps I'd envisaged slumber as a lengthy, aching revisitation of that surreal ordeal, but its passage is an imperceptible void. It's merely an infinitesimal blink, greeted instantly by the steepled arch of the ceiling and the elegantly tapered spans of rafters, in spectacular relief despite the minute trickle of struggling predawn light barely seeping through the preternatural darkness exuded by the garden. My eyes are drawn to that implausible shadow; it seems peculiarly defined, as if that extraordinary pooling of blackness is an improbably luminous flare, accenting the solemn and eerie spire of the pagoda.

"_Shego_?" I somehow envision that I should be enveloped in a haze of unbearable bleariness, barely able to reconcile myself with the present fulfillment of every silent fantasy that I've stewarded within the deepest and secretest reaches of my soul; that lucid consciousness is more jarring than anything I've ever experienced.

"Yes, Kimberly." Xi Go is effortlessly invisible amid the murk, little more than a thickening of shadow at the fringes of my vision; crouched beside my bed, I can perceive her presence as an extraordinary but oddly subdued focus of a glorious electricity. Again, I'm stricken by the sensation of being reborn; of alien and impossible senses awakening within me, layers of reality flayed away by a blind and perfect sight; the silent thunder of even the minutest motion, of the subtlest swallow's breath, perceived by deaf ears of transcendental acuity; of the merest ghost of a distant breeze beating upon my hypersensitive flesh.

"Where am I?" Despite how overtly ludicrous that question must seem, I'm overcome for a moment by the sheer foreignness of my surroundings. Even with the conscious memory of the past weeks, this feels more peculiar than it ever has; the sullen and wilted darkness of my bedchamber, and the garden that throbs with a defined and palpable life where there once lay merely the singular and impenetrable.

"You're here, Kimberly; you're with me." A beat. "It's four-thirty in the morning. I allowed you to sleep."

"What happened?"

"I cannot explain in words." A muted rustle as something remarkably weighty tumbles upon my stomach; my hands clasp upon it at once, discovering a wad of startlingly abrasive and coarse fabric.

"What is this?"

"We haven't a great deal of time."

"_Shego_-"

"Please, do not mind me. Dress with haste."

"All right." It is clothing, albeit resembling nothing that I've ever experienced. Rising rather thoughtlessly, I'm astonished to discover the icy kiss of the startlingly chilled air across my bare skin, rather than the delicate rustle of my dressing down; the ensuing flush permeates even that arctic embrace, the garment tumbling quietly to the floor, long forgotten, as I struggle to force the gathered and knotted silk around my chest and shoulders. The agonizing, smoldering breath blazing within my chest gradually flees my pursed lips, the mortified strain seizing my body gently relaxing as it occurs to me that I'm likely as invisible as she is amid the blackness; the certainty that she must have swaddled me nude amongst the blankets resurrects that with a seething vengeance.

"Kimberly, there is no need for modesty. I-"

"I know." My voice emerges as a pathetic wisp of a whimper, seemingly inaudible above the thundering silence that overtakes us. She's likely long since become intimately acquainted with every nuance, every curve and contour, of my body; such an epiphany ignites a peculiar and exhilarating jumble of emotions, every inch of my flesh overcome with a quivering excitement. Despite these peculiar circumstances, I can feel that transcendental, aching heat flare through me again, pooling at the core of that palpable, inarticulate need.

"I know." I repeat, accompanied by a nod of my head. It occurs to me that, rather than the tortured knot I expect, my hair flutters with a flawless definition, every individual filament rustling delicately, perfectly separated in a fluid fall, against my cheeks. A perfectly ridiculous, giddy smile parts my lips at that notion, and I start at the shearing pain that lashes through them. "O-ow."

"Is anything the matter, Kimberly?"

"Nothing. No. My lips hurt." It's so trivial that I feel silly for even having mentioned it, finally sweeping my legs with an unexpected and thoroughly unaccountable alacrity from beneath the quietly rustling sheets. My feet unleash a muted thump as they finally find purchase upon the floor, and I briefly wonder with no uncertain mortification if her vision is more acute than mine; it's not as if I can precisely send her away, however.

A savage shiver rips through me at the complete exposure to the predawn air, and, my foot brushing against the parcel of clothing, I seize it from the floor; it unfolds at once, reflecting with a remarkably pronounced radiance the minute shreds of dim and pitiful light peering through the blackness. It's as if diamonds have been woven into every thread, a supernatural luminosity that imbues it, even with such feeble definition, with a tantalizing beauty.

I'm awed by how brittle and crisp the material is; perhaps some form of fine cotton or linen, or something infinitely more exotic, I ponder, as I shrug into what I discover to be a tautly-clinging jacket. It, and the simple, billowing trousers, perfectly conform to my body, as if a second layer of skin that hovers at a majestically comfortable clearance from my flesh. The core strains around my chest, even as the deep, slashing neckline bares my collarbone to the gradually rising warmth enveloping me.

It strikes me with a sudden and glorious epiphany: this is Xi Go's peculiar costume, that wondrous and exotic uniform that accompanies her beauteous and incomparable dance. "Is-"

"Yes." Her reply affords little ambiguity that she perfectly understands my thoughts; it wouldn't startle me to discover that she can actually read them as readily as she would the simplest of words upon a page.

"Truly?"

"You're joining me this morning."

"W-what?" Perhaps my sheer bewilderment is the sole force supporting my body, my legs seemingly hardly suited to the task, a savage tremor streaking through them. I can feel an almost nightmarish swell of warmth boil through my stomach, my heart beginning to thunder in my chest at the notion. "I don't know how to dance like that."

"Dance?" My utter humiliation becomes a seemingly tangible force at the giggle that provokes. "Actually, I suppose it is, isn't it?"

"S-still-"

"Please." I jolt at the accuracy with which her hand seeks out mine, fingers lacing around my own. "You can; I know that you can." It's as if we have throughout the whole of our lives.

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly that." A beat. "I won't ask you to jump from the balcony this morning, though." It's delivered with an obvious, lip-quirking amusement, but it inspires a rather peculiar image of drifting from that cool stone, heated with an impossible flame, with the utmost ease and languor.

"I- I don't know if my parents will approve." My final defense.

"Will they see you? It's not yet even five in the morning." A thoughtful moment. "And, even if they do, is there anything the matter with exercise?"

"It's unseemly." Mother has often articulated that opinion. I certainly recall how she scolded me for joining Vasilevich in his sailor's calisthenics, even if tossing about that momentous leather sack was remarkably exhilarating.

"Come, Princess." I can feel my flush swell to a blazing peak, but I simply cannot refuse her as that beauteous voice caresses those words so cajolingly.

"All- all right." I finally agree, beginning to stumble awkwardly about the bedchamber in search of my shoes.

"Kimberly?"

"Yes?"

"What are you doing?" She finally asks, as if she's a bit baffled by some extraordinary display of stupidity.

"My shoes-"

"You can't dance," her voice seems to suggest an enduring amusement with that notion, "With those shoes."

"You mean-"

"Yes. Is there anything the matter with being barefoot?"

"No. I suppose not. I don't know."

"Come." Her hand seizes mine again, and she refuses to release it; it's such a firm, powerful pressure, a casual jolt of her bewilderingly powerful arm sending me tumbling against her. My breath hitches in my chest at the warmth that boils from within her, at the contact of her skin against my own; the wondrous embrace of that transcendental fragrance, delicate and of a tantalizing exoticism.

"All right." I can merely agree, still fastened to her as the door creaks open, deafening amid this still darkness. Not even the servants have awakened at this hour, it seems; total quietude reigns, this isolated garden awash with a spectacular muteness. "It's so quiet."

"It's wonderful. Silence is required to truly concentrate, Kimberly." She lectures, her footfalls totally inaudible, even as her pace quickens, dragging me- my own steps of a pathetically elephantine awkwardness as I stumble at the apex of every lunging jolt, barely managing to balance- toward the courtyard.

"To concentrate? On what?"

"Everything. The rhythm of life, of being; to feel a hidden energy that vibrates through everything."

"What do you mean?"

"You'll learn; I'm teaching you to remember everything."

"What?" She doesn't reply; I can suddenly no longer concentrate upon anything but the sudden, flaring susurration of the atmosphere as it seems to awaken in her presence. It's what I'd felt the afternoon of our arrival, and whenever I've experienced the garden as we explored its limitless and sublime majesty together, but magnified impossibly. It's as if an aura of pure, invisible energy unfolds from her, shearing through the stillness of those murky shadows to awaken beings of deafening noiselessness and impossible, radiant invisibility; presences that lie beyond the shroud of reality, even as the merest suggestion of their being explodes through my senses.

"_S-Shego_-"

"Please, just feel it. I know that you can."

"Can't everyone?" Despite her admonition, I can't suppress that; I'm as astonished as I was that afternoon that not everyone has been aroused by such feral power boiling from glorious nature.

"No." A simple and forthright reply. "For most, reality comes in extremes; of light and darkness; sight and blindness; sound and silence; existence and nonexistence." I don't interrupt her. My eyes have begun to adjust to the half-light, and Xi Go rises into majestic focus; raven locks bound into a taut tail that arcs from the base of her skull, her features alight with an extraordinary intensity. "All of these are untruths."

"I don't understand."

"Those absolutes are fictions, generated by our own limitations; by the deficiencies bred by a belief in the strength of man's flaws, rather than his potential." Somehow, I've the sense that this is the archetypal dark and inscrutable Asian mysticism that's such a popular topic of discussion and ridicule. I find myself enraptured by her deep and reverential tone. "You must renounce those, to live in the gray shadows that gleam with the beautiful revelation of the soul's light."

"_Sheg_-" That peculiar sensation of blind eyes opening again, perceiving a sudden and savage flicker of motion beside me; little more than the ghost of an intent, an aura that blazes emerald through the murky darkness. The slim, graceful length of her leg hammers with a resonant thunder against my forearms; I didn't even realize that I raised them in defense, but they scream out with a nightmare, rending anguish with the enormity of that blow.

"Excellent." There's a curious suggestion of an oddly smug smirk upon her lips, even as I'm oriented away from her, abruptly frozen with a sickly terror that renders me so horridly aware of the sense of total frailty that's settled across me.

"W-why did you hit me?" My lips tremble, tears beading at the fringes of my eyes, even as I feel that feral spirit begin to cry out with deafening rapture.

"I didn't hit you. I would have." Another simple and cryptic retort.

"You hit my arms." That emerges as a pitiful whine.

"You defended yourself; that would have broken your neck." Stated so matter-of-factly, as if those monstrous words are no more hurtful than a frivolous comment about the weather.

"That's not-" That peculiar, gauzy vision senses a further swell of that jade radiance, and my 'real' eyes- for this impossible sight has become almost more intense than my ordinary senses- open upon an inverted world, my palms braced upon stone spiderwebbed with ragged, lacerating seams. A sense of swollen strength recedes as it occurs to me that I'd never managed so much as a cartwheel in a very brief flirtation with gymnastic training; a blistering, gasping anguish rips through my chest as, with a cruelly exaggerated, deliberate slowness, my arms buckle and my back delivers a pathetically damp, hollow thump against the unyielding surface. "Ow."

"You're regaining your strength." A startlingly blasé observation from above me. In the gathering dawn light, Xi Go's beatific features are haloed against a boiling aura of dappled gold.

"It hurts." I wheeze, gradually regaining the capacity to breathe without pining for death.

"I know, Kimberly. I know." Her hand finally eases into my vision at the instant that peculiar, subdued spirit begins to rage again. I've never slapped anyone, much less thrown a punch, but my fist lashes out with feral intensity; an elastic energy ripples through me, my entire body flowing with a serpentine grace, placing me upon my bare feet again. "Tricky." I can now perceive every teasing smile, every sidelong glance that simultaneously dissolves my spine with a feeble, wilting girlishness and energizes a deeper, more primal heat. The darkness is lifting more swiftly than the dawn is rising, and I'm overcome by an irresistible urge to surrender myself to that intuitive sense of total rightness, however surreal and wholly wrong it must be.

"I've missed this." A voice that is and isn't mine rips through air that crackles with a palpable electricity; I'm a passenger amid my own senses, feeling unnoticed strength well into blazing life, the pale fringes of my toes catapulting toward Xi Go's thoroughly unworried features. There's no savage impact, my partner vanishing from sight; my heel hammers down in an instant, barely grazing the crackling fabric of her costume.

"So have I." The dance continues; a savage, whirling ballet of vaulting strikes. It's such a visceral, throbbing cadence, fencing with our bodies; scoring blows with a brutality of suspended anguish. Even as I'm certain that she's bruising me with every strike, and I her, there's no semblance of pain; that shuddering rapture flares to a blinding apogee, and I find myself yearning for the clash of bone and sinew, of muscle and flesh. "You're rediscovering those memories."

"How?" My voice is Kimberly's; my thoughts are Kimberly's. Why, then, do I feel as if someone else is speaking for me? "What is this?"

"The sacred techniques of Zhangzi." Xi Go explains, as if that's of any relevance to me. Nevertheless, I find myself wheeling away from a devastating series of blows without a single breath or pause; my sight returns to her slim form contorted with an impossible elegance, one leg upraised, canted at an agonizing angle, gently lowering it to the stone.

"What is happening to me?" That strength abandons me, and, my legs suddenly becoming water, my knees crackle excruciatingly to the courtyard. A low, moaning wail begins to rise from the pit of my chest; I'm forced to clamp my palms upon my aching lips to stifle it, fearful of attracting any attention. That careless brutality has evaporated; I'm terrified, trembling, an indescribable anguish coruscating through every nerve. My entire body feels bruised and battered, as if I've been lashed for hours in a fit of unfathomable cruelty; the world shimmers and whorls through the haze of tears lunging into my eyes. "_S-Shego_... It- it hurts. It hurts so much. W-why?"

"Kimberly." A quiet sigh of what seems to be disappointment, which further intensifies the sense of utter failure boiling through me. I can't perceive any suggestion of that shimmering gray definition; violent, livid colors lunge back into my vision, and it's obvious that I'm bawling, sobbing like a pathetic, stricken infant, doubled over and upon the verge of vomiting from the snap of pain more horrific than anything I've ever suffered.

"I'm- I'm so sorry, Kimberly. I... I just thought..." Xi Go doesn't bother completing her sentence, simply folding herself with characteristic grace to her knees beside me. I expect that I'll cringe with a hideous, unnatural fear at the touch of her battering hands upon my shoulder, but that's perfectly ludicrous; the pain dissolves beneath such a glorious caress, that sensual electricity permeating me in a sublime wave of tenderness.

"_Shego_... I'm sorry." I haven't the slightest inkling of why, beyond those half-remembered thoughts, implausible instincts, and that screaming certainty of failure with which that savage inner voice rages.

"Don't be. You... You were extraordinary. You were; I hadn't expected that much from you so soon. This was my fault; I should still have trained you from the beginning."

"What does any of this mean?"

"It will focus your mind and body; it will afford you a control that humans must cultivate, even as it is intrinsic to all other beings."

"What do you mean?" The tears have ebbed away, and I turn to her. I'm astonished by how dark my surroundings are, that the stark gray definition- nevertheless alive with a vibrant splendor that renders such insipid color almost depressingly drab by contrast- supplanted by my common sight.

"Humanity's greatest weakness is its need for those absolutes; to be in motion or to be still; to find purpose in everything that it might not have. They cannot simply be; they do not understand why a stream would flow, or a mountain would be still, both mighty in their perfection."

"I-"

"These are foreign ideas to you, I am sure."

"They are." I've been taught that everything has, and must have, a purpose; idleness, sloth, and such indulgent silliness have been the bane of my mother's existence, and I haven't experienced a single day without a diatribe against them.

"Birds fly, and snakes slither; when they come into conflict, which one is right, and what is their purpose? Both seek merely to live; there is no deeper meaning." She lectures. I have the sense that this is more precious a lesson than Great Britain's annual steel production. "This is the meaning of action in inaction; of _wei_ _wu wei_."

"W-what?"

"_Wu wei_." A beat. "And _wei wu wei_. _Wu wei_ is of the great teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi; of inaction. That does not mean inertia, or a lack of movement; it is simply natural motion and action, of action without artificial intent and rationale."

"Oh."

"And _wei wu wei_ is a paradox, but a deeply precious one; it is to be in action without action, to do with purpose without purpose." I suppose that certain stereotypes about inscrutable Asiatics aren't totally without merits.

"Do you understand what I mean?"

"No." I answer plainly, without any effort at deception; I've no doubt that she expects me to be totally befuddled.

"Excellent." A luminous smile blossoms across her black lips. "You are beginning to learn."

"I... Don't understand."

"Again, I am proud that you are willing to admit this. I did not understand, either; it frustrated me. My mentor taught me these things. He tormented my mind with the learning that I craved in my ignorance, of the classics of Kongzi's school, of order and reason, and then presented me with the insoluble and the illogical. Of governance without order, of strength in formless water and weakness in the stoutest stone; of the total rectitude and comprehensibility of paradox, and the nonsense of reason.

"He taught me that there is nothing but that order, of the _Tao_."

"Dow?" A boat?

"_Tao_." A beat. "The Way." I can hear the emphasis, the reverential intensity with which she speaks it.

"The Way?"

"The natural order of all; the Way that life and energy flow of their own volition, beyond even the essential truth of the _Wuxing_. It transcends everything in its simplicity, dwarfs all in the immensity of its achingly grand and unresolvable truth. No mortal and no god can ever capture what it means; even Sakyamuni would wrack his mind for eternity in a struggle to understand it. Laozi and Zhuangzi made no pretension, and no one can be expected to comprehend it."

"Then-"

"Then, why study it?" I nod. Xi Go speaks with an extraordinary excitement and urgency, as if she's ecstatic at the notion of finally teaching me something worthwhile. Why, then, did she await until this moment? "Because, it cannot be studied, but we crave it. We know that it eludes us, even as the meanest and simplest of beings grasp it intuitively. Our minds deceive us, and they stymie our growth; they deny us that one crucial wisdom above all else.

"Humans are the frailest and most accursed of creatures in creation for this reason. Even as we live in the divine order, and are blessed to hold such capacity for wisdom, we are tormented by the fact that our minds seek deeper meaning in everything. We are much like the gods, but infinitely weaker; and even they are bound to, and cannot fathom, the Way."

"That's..." Sacrilege? Heathenism? Impossibly unchristian? "So extraordinary." My mind is torn between a sense of utter enrapturement and a lingering trace of horror at how utterly alien it is; it's a peculiar ambivalence, heightened in its intensity as I kneel upon the cool, ancient stone, feeling the throbbing rhythm that she describes soaring around me.

"Yes, it is." Her arms lace around me, engulfing me in an embrace that's at once the most familiar, transcendentally natural intimacy, and bewilderingly foreign; I love it.

"Why does this feel so natural to me?" I didn't even intend to voice that, but that sense has risen ever further, beyond merely a vague, niggling and unconscious inkling to a constant, yammering awareness of something powerful and genuine. It's as if I've spent life upon life in her arms; as though these revelations are merely revisitations of something central to my existence.

"You will learn." Again, she refuses to explain.

"_Shego_?"

"Yes?" Xi Go's voice throbs through her chest, sloshing through my reeling mind.

"This feels perfect. Beautiful." It truly does. It's as if my life, the life that has consumed me for seventeen years, has merely been a fragile and ephemeral fantasy; a delirium that's begun to recede into nothingness. Somehow, it begins to resolve what had once been so incomprehensible to me; that sense of detachment from what I was so certain should be sacred... The odd and frightful distance from god, from everything that my mother vaunted as being central to my life; that terrified me with the utter emptiness that it invoked within me, even when that spirit seemed to consume her.

"Kimberly."

"You still call me that." That startles me more than anything I've ever spoken; that name feels natural- it is mine-, and yet seems merely one of many of equal significance to me.

"You..." My eyes are agape at the brief, seismic shudder that rips through her, the savage strength, eternally restrained, of her limbs flaring into being for the most fleeting of moments. I'm crushed to her, a brittle and raw gasp tearing itself from her throat.

"Everything is so strange."

"I know. I know that it is."

"Why do I feel as if you've said my name in so many different ways?"

"You would not believe me if I told you; you would not understand. It would... It would be such a feeble parody of the truth, in any event. I- I wish for you to live it; it should not come from me." Every word creeps with agonizing deliberateness from Xi Go, as if she speaks them against the desperate yearning that I can feel convulsing her.

"_Shego_-"

"Please." She interrupts, her voice a fragile whisper. "I'm so sorry, Kimberly, but I cannot say anything further. It would- it would be too terribly difficult for both of us." Xi Go remains fastened to me, hands straining with a palpable tension, her fingertips nearly bruising in the pressure with which they jab into my flesh. I'm certain that I can perceive the sun's rise along the horizon above the manor's sharply angled roof as we remain still together, her chest swelling and relaxing in an aching, tortured cadence.

"Who are you, _Shego_?" I finally ask, voicing a bewilderment that's been gnawing at me since the moment my gaze fell upon her.

"K-Kimberly?" I've never confronted such astonishment from her; she's never been without an answer, however cryptic, that seemed to affirm a singular omniscience.

"Are you only my governess, _Shego_?" I speak haltingly, a bit baffled by what emerges from my lips. "It's- it's been so strange; since the very moment I met you, I felt as if none of this were only coincidence, that you just happened to be hired by father. I feel as though everything has led me to you, and it's confusing beyond description; why, if that were true, you'd... You'd just continue this without telling me anything, without explaining anything."

"I cannot-"

"I know that." It's my opportunity to interrupt; she seems even more astounded by that. "I know that you cannot tell me, for whatever reason. I..." A quiet, pensive sigh. "I don't know if I believe you; I'm afraid that you're not being totally honest with me."

"I understand." Again, no definitive answer.

"Even still, you're teaching me; I'm beginning to understand everything. Why you've taken me to the garden so often, why you've gradually exposed me to what I felt so powerfully, so beautifully, for those few minutes."

"We sparred for an hour." Another jarring revelation.

"Even so, I think that I'm beginning to understand. You..." That first, peculiar instinct that embarrassed me so intensely to voice upon our arrival returns. "Are you a witch?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"But-"

"The term 'witch' doesn't exist in our culture. Magic isn't something rarefied or unusual; it doesn't stem from a pact with the divine or demonic. It's cultivated as surely as any other gift or talent; it's an alchemy." I'm taken aback at how matter-of-factly she states this, a further stream of blatant sacrilege that seems completely and utterly natural amid the shimmering, supernatural power of the garden. "I suppose that the word would be 'sorceress'."

"You're..." Obligingly, she parts from me as that susurration rises again to a yammering, furious pinnacle; that stark, luminous gray definition refuses to return, regardless of how desperately I focus, but such mystical power permeates even my insipid senses. Every individual, delicate filament of her raven locks parts by minute degrees; that wondrous mane swells with a tangible power, her eyes tinged with a singular jade glimmer.

My breath hitches in my chest, and I realize that I couldn't possibly have been prepared for this. Even with the unrelenting litany of ever more vivid and bizarre dreams, this is well beyond anything that I could have envisaged, particularly as the gathering daylight shreds away any possibility of preserving the delusion that such magic is merely an eerie phantasm amid the murky shadows. A truly furious wave of concentrated mystic energy plumes from within the impenetrable depths of the garden, so deep and convoluted as to be a jungle unto itself; it seems to radiate from the pagoda, until I realize that its towering majesty merely resonates with the palpitating force streaming in level, regular waves from Xi Go with each unstrained breath.

"_Shego_." My gasp is alight with an uneasy, writhing duality of excitement and pure terror. Without the heightened calm that accompanied that spectacular awareness, my common and prosaic senses are simply overwhelmed by what's unfolding from the garden's depths. "What is that?"

"Life." A simple and unhurried reply. Her anxiety has been subsumed into an absolute calm. "Life's energy, made manifest. It's a simple feat of alchemy, to balance the fields of other creatures and force them to release what they naturally bear."

"W-why?"

"To understand. As paradoxical, again, as I'm sure it seems, to learn the _Tao_ is still to struggle with wisdom that cannot begin to touch its pure and intuitive magnificence."

"I-"

"Can you fly without first learning to crawl?" I've never heard it phrased in quite that manner. "Humans are feeble and weak-minded; we think in terms of association, rather than direct truth. Flying is a form of movement beyond most humans." Most? "But, what is distantly related to it?"

"Crawling."

"Exactly."

"What does this have to do with me?"

"Everything, Kimberly." Xi Go unfolds with a graceful alacrity to her full height, extending her hand again in a gesture that I've come to approach with a certain apprehension. "Please, do not be afraid; I can control what you felt."

"What I felt?" I mutter to myself, feeling her slim fingers fasten around my palm, lifting me effortlessly to my feet with a motion that seems to, in the manner of her dance, disregard those inconvenient intermediary poses and movements; I vault from an awkward kneeling posture to standing at full height in an instant.

"Yes."

"That electricity?" That remains the sole possible description; that seething, crackling power that coruscates across every nerve.

"That's life in intuitive movement; it flows naturally, and is often weak, but can be concentrated and channeled as one would a river." I can feel it, suddenly and with a baffling intensity; it recedes as swiftly as it rose. The sole suggestion of any change is the lightening of her eyes toward a half-remembered emerald splendor that seems drawn from the distant reaches of an impossible dream.

"Is that what you did-"

"I cannot, Kimberly. Not now." A vigorous shake of her head. "Not now. I'm afraid that even I didn't anticipate how powerfully you would embrace that; you nearly died."

"What?" I goggle at that. Those bleary suggestions of distant and inscrutable thought and sensation momentarily reformed into more coherent memories in the thrall of that elevated awareness; they seem nearer than they had been, but can nevertheless merely be glimpsed beyond a shifting curtain of mist. I must have realized it then, straining against that crackling and unrelenting anguish within the bath, but I can barely reconcile such a sense with my present reality.

"You nearly died; you were trying to refashion yourself too terribly quickly, and it was overwhelming you. You were no longer breathing; your fields were in temporary balance, until it became too much for you." She clearly doesn't expect me to understand; it's another explanation without context or definition, deferring my comprehension for another day. As it is, it's terrifying, the sense of having glimpsed such horrific power that may lie within my fragile body.

"What does that mean?"

"It would require a great deal of study to even begin to explain. I will try, however, when we have our lessons. For the moment, I would wish to pose one question to you." Xi Go is more patient than I suspect she desires to be; approaching me as if a blind and ignorant child, even as she must believe that every answer already exists within my hopelessly oblivious mind.

I can feel an aching, anxious tension, as though she's known me for an eternity, and I've become an amnesiac; as if we live and vibrate upon two distinct planes, barely separated but divided by an unresolvable haze of incomprehension. It's unbearably frustrating, particularly as I feel that so strongly, as well; that my weakness is barring me from embracing some crucial truth that will instantly unite us, that will wrench away this excruciating sense of distance between master and disciple that neither of us can bear.

"A-all right." I am, however, nonetheless but a child in this life; I am, whatever else I may be, or may have been, Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym. I had hardly heard of China a year ago; the thought of magic terrified me with its sinister and exotic grandeur; foreign was a glimpse of our Tartar footman. "What is it?"

"Why did I not kill you with that first blow?" My eyes snap to her at once from their disoriented, half-seeing stare into the infinite majesty of the garden's alien blackness, shadows rising into starker relief with the sun's burgeoning blaze. The thought of her killing me so frivolously, with but a brief, snapping blow, is agonizing; a certain sense of betrayal burns within my breast, even as I feel an odd sense of gratification in her having entrusted me with protecting myself.

"I raised my arms."

"Precisely. But, why was that?" Awkwardly, with hardly the subtlest shred of that power and focus, I lift my feeble and trembling limbs again; it's pathetic and silly, particularly as there no longer is the guidance of that shivering aura to suggest, obliquely but with perfect clarity, what I should even perceive.

"I saw something. It- it was an odd green haze; it must have been in the corner of my eyes, but it felt as if I'd stared directly at it. Even when you were behind me, it was there." A decidedly delighted smile tugs at her ebon lips; her reply is a simple nod. "What was that?"

"Exactly as you said."

"I didn't say much of anything."

"It was everywhere, wasn't it? That's the energy that I described; an aura."

"Aura?"

"Yes. You could feel it, couldn't you? My spirit; even my intentions. That's why you raised your arms when it flared so strongly; you could feel the menace to you, even if it wasn't actual hostility toward you."

"I suppose so."

"That's what Zhangzi taught to his disciples, and that's what a command of those energies allows: you can perceive the nature in everything by mastering the flow of the spirit."

"Why was everything else gray?"

"That is what it is; it had no awareness or sense of you beyond your essential place in its order. The trees and flowers thought nothing of you; they had as much urge to attack you as they would to walk across the garden."

"But, you did attack."

"Exactly."

"And, it was gray, but so vibrant. It felt like there was more color and vividness in that than anything I'd ever seen." Xi Go seems delighted, but slightly startled by that.

"You felt it so strongly?"

"Yes. I- I wish that I still could." It was rapturous, a sense of complete consciousness; the opening of perception into planes of existence that had eluded me throughout the whole of my life. It wasn't completion; it was beyond that, as if I were rising into another world entirely.

"That's remarkable, Kimberly."

"It is?" I remain thoroughly bewildered; even with that demonstration, with those unearthly senses, the whole of this seems little more than a waking fiction.

"Do you still want to feel it?"

"Yes!" I answer without a moment's hesitation, finding myself jolting a pace toward her. "Yes." I repeat, and again. "Yes. Will you teach me?"

"Yes." A luminous welling of joy; she reaches out to me again, and I unhesitatingly claim her hand. We stand in silence for a moment until she speaks again. "Kimberly?"

"Yes?"

"Everything, I am sure, will seem very strange for you from this point forth." Her expression has become more pensive, though it remains so unyieldingly gentle and encouraging. "I... I may seem different, or unusual. I only wish for you to understand that- that this is very, very difficult for me." A severe breath. "I will say no more; but, please do not be discouraged if I become impatient, or if I no longer seem myself. This has been more challenging than I ever would have imagined."

"I see." Bewilderment hardly begins to capture the sheer magnitude of my confusion, but I understand that no deeper explanation, as per usual, is forthcoming.

"I ask only that you allow yourself to feel what you feel; that you conceal nothing from yourself, or from me. And do not feel..." Another aching instant of contemplation and focus, as if quieting some desperate, agonizing compulsion. "Do not feel any sense of... Of obligation."

"I see." A vacuous and anemic reply from me, little more than a whisper. I've been pleading for her guidance, for her strength to force me inescapably toward some glorious certainty, an answer to be wrenched forth for me from this swimming and baffling delirium. I'm instead confronted with a decision that seems as cruel for her as for me; that I'm to struggle through this haze of uncertainty and debilitating surreality with merely her gentle, prodding guidance, never quite certain of what is truth and what simply seems real. Perhaps, as she has said, nothing is knowable; there is no certainty.

I wish that I had some inkling of what that obligation is; to her, or to myself, or to both of us. Perhaps it has no connection with the obvious; perhaps she's afraid for me; perhaps she's afraid of me.

"What do we do, then?"

"Obey me. Follow me. Entrust yourself to me until you feel the courage and awareness to reach out to that knowledge of your own power." A beauteously warm and encouraging smile. "I ask that you trust me, as well; that you will accept that I care only for you, for your well-being. Even what seems an impossible or cruel task is for your benefit."

"I will." The sun has begun to slant further and further skyward, cleaving through the sullen and slightly dank chill of the courtyard; a fine sheen of sweat begins to bead across my skin, aggravating me within the stiff folds of the costume.

"Then, let us begin." I've somehow begun to expect that progress will arise in spectacular, lunging jolts of raw ferocity; that there will be leaps, rather than mere steps. I'm astonished when she doesn't vault at me, raining a further series of unforgiving blows upon me; she bows. "I will be happy to be your teacher again."

"I am, too, for that." I feel as though I've spoken those words often in the past; that this isn't merely the resumption, or escalation, of my studies as Kimberly. There are no further words as she approaches; her hands guide me, more captivating and eloquent in their diligent and patient instruction than the sonorous magnificence of her voice. An electric splendor directs every gentle and seemingly unnatural contortion of my body; every unusual twist of my hips and peculiar pivot of my arms, hands easing away from my chest with every exhalation, returning with each intake of breath in a grindingly patient and ponderous imitation of her bafflingly deft dance.

Even when she abandons me, it seems as if that touch lingers, a smoldering and entrancing presence upon my skin through the stout fabric of my clothing. She remains in flawless time beside me, offering occasional, terse suggestions that resonate as irresistible commands; to tense my chest, to relax my body, to flow with, rather than resist, my body's natural momentum. Breathing seems more significant than the motions themselves; virtually every command seems to connect with that central dictate, instructing me in the proper pattern. It's excruciating. As mild and languorous as this martial dance appears, the strain is exquisite as I struggle to effect her increasingly stringent orders.

She breathes with a level, effortless cadence while I wheeze and gasp, seeming to be suffocating upon every new breath as this beautiful costume becomes awash in my perspiration; barely the slightest droplet beads upon her brow, even as I'm forced to pause at length to grind it away from its inexorable flow toward my eyes.

"This- this is really, really hard." I finally grunt, realizing from her slightly bemused expression that I've spoken in Russian. "This is hard." I repeat in German.

"I know."

"I- I haven't even started teaching you Russian, like I promised. How-how did you know?" Somehow, I can muster the energy to gasp out those words while I contort and sway in time with her, even as every motion is elephantine and crude, broad and without coordination, by contrast with the fluid perfection of her own. I realize that no movement is squandered for Xi Go, no trace of energy wasted; there's a deft, easy sharpness to every stroke, every recoil.

"I can feel it, Kimberly."

"O-of course." It would be ridiculous, I suppose, if she couldn't; even if she weren't... A sorceress, it would be obvious. "W-what is this, anyway?"

"Not everything requires a name." She answers with characteristic crypticness, but continues before my overheated mind directs my lips toward a thoroughly stupid reply. "_Taiji quan_. It allows you to control and focus your breath; it's essential to master this before anything."

"W-why?"

"Are you struggling, Kimberly?"

"Yes." It's obvious; even persisting with this for an hour with such stern, level focus, never pausing, never straying from this infernal pattern, is exhausting me.

"That is why. But," Xi Go speaks with an ease that seems designed to torment me as I struggle, "The physical act is of lesser importance than what it permits you to achieve internally. The pursuit of perfection through the _Tao_, though never absolute, requires an extraordinary harmony. You must relinquish such severe physicality and allow the spirit of the act, not the intention, to guide you."

"That sounds so simple."

"That is why it is so difficult." A brief and slightly teasing laugh. "The greatest challenge in a battle is even discovering the enemy, not striking them."

"How, how was it so easy before?"

"Easy?" A perfectly innocent reply.

"Fighting with you. We moved so quickly. I'd never, ever moved like that; I didn't even know that I could. Before, I couldn't even manage a somersault."

"You may rediscover that occasionally. The spirit is resilient; traces of instinct and power endure." That's of little comfort to me as I struggle to keep my arms aloft; it feels as if, as the sun creeps ever further across the sky, its rays beat upon me with a truly tangible force, battering my weary body and struggling to force me into a thoroughly irresistible submission. "Before, you... You may have reawakened more than we both might have hoped; but it is incomplete, nonetheless. It could be very confusing; you may find the familiar peculiar, and the alien completely comfortable."

"I... I think I," a deep, panting breath, "I think that I understand. I've felt that occasionally. Like I'm two different people." I would have been mortified to utter anything so bizarre even yesterday; but she's emboldened me with the promises that she exacted. It's an unbelievable relief to no longer be burdened with a concern for humiliating myself with such surreal notions.

"Perhaps more than two."

"Hey, little lady!" Vasilevich's bellow thunders across the courtyard like an artillery barrage. His peculiar, hobbling gait carries him at a spectacular sprint across the ancient stone; he manages to balance himself to deliver a fervent, almost manic gesticulation as he approaches, as if there would be any doubt of his identity. I've constantly been 'little lady'; occasionally, when Vasilevich is particularly generous or drunk and subversive, _Tsarevna_.

For once, I'm vexed by his arrival, my breath coming in hitching pants as my gaze flickers between the boisterous sailor and Xi Go; that final remark seemed almost deliberately provocative, as if inviting me to continue probing whatever life may lie beyond this one. It's assuredly impossible now to delve into such arcane mysticism in the presence of a man that considers even other Christians appalling apostates.

"Vasilevich." I struggle to recapture any semblance of normality, as if, by reigning in my gasps, I'll revert to my standard, conservative guise as a Russian noblewoman.

"Lookin' mighty odd this mornin', you don't my sayin', little lady." He offers with a wry quirk of his perennially sunburnt lips as he approaches, finally slowing as he eases nearer to Xi Go.

"Good morning, Evgeny Vasilevich." I notice that Xi Go has learned that salutation in Russian, if nothing else; his smile widens to a massive, exaggerated gash across his rugged features at that.

"Always good ta see two pretty girls first thing'in the mornin, 'm I right?" A roaring guffaw, as if compensating for the absence of his traditional entourage.

"What did he say?" Xi Go whispers, albeit at a volume that obvious piques Vasilevich's interest.

"Just sayin' how good 'tis to see ya, Miss Go." He answers in German as elegantly flawed as his Russian, with an almost ridiculously ostentatious flourish. "And the little lady, 'course."

"Little lady?" Somehow, despite everything, that raises an aching self-consciousness; any sense of adulthood evaporates in the presence of that crass and bellowing seaman, and I feel as if I'm reverting to the familiar and uncomfortable timidity of Kimberly Dmitriovna, rather than whatever I should be.

"Aye, been with the family since the little lady was born. She's growin' into a true lady, though; maybe I should just start callin' her 'lady'." Another thundering laugh.

"That's so sweet, Kimberly." Xi Go echoes his laughter, albeit with a fortuitously demure giggle; it's nevertheless mortifying. "'Little lady'."

"Y-yes." That emerges as a smoldering whisper, wishing that I could pummel Vasilevich.

"What brings you to the courtyard this morning, Evgeny Vasilevich?"

"Me? Just seein' ta the lads; they're gettin' mighty anxious here, just sittin' 'round, waitin' for somethin' ta do. So, I been takin' 'em with the Tartar out to see the sights. That, and sometimes that creepy chink comes with us." A beat, "No 'ffense, 'course, Miss Go." Vasilevich is indeed perfectly chivalrous, assuming that he's in the presence of a beautiful woman.

"None taken." A congenial and wholly artificial grin. Then again, she didn't seem enormously enamored of Chang, either; he seemed to be terrified of Xi Go.

"They're not in school yet?"

"Nay, not yet. Gonna be mighty soon, though; think I might start ta miss the little buggers."

"It couldn't be too soon." I grouse; I've become weary of their perennial, upraised shouts of play, particularly when they harass me from the courtyard as I struggle to focus upon Xi Go's glorious lessons.

"Yer gettin' antsy, 're ya, little lady?"

"It's hard to concentrate on my studies with those boys." I mutter again, with a venom that rather startles me. I'm greeted with a gleeful wail of laughter from Vasilevich.

"Aye, 'tis a time in everyone's life when they decide they want away from house and home, and especially away from pesky siblings. I had a brother- I ever tell ya that?"

"No."

"Aye." A vigorous nod. "Poor boy." A brief darkening of his features with a harsh and sudden solemnity, before his signature glee returns. "Still, was glad to get off ta the navy; finally get the little pest of my back."

"Vasilevich?"

"Hm?"

"Have you spoken with Maria and Valentina lately?" I certainly don't expect such abrupt and contrived neutrality from Vasilevich, whose conception of self-restraint is occasionally foregoing one further glass of vodka. His features are suddenly taut, strained, a pathetically exaggerated smile seeming to drain every semblance of joy from his ordinarily lively eyes.

"Pardon, miss? Er, uh, little lady?" Such ridiculously manufactured normality.

"Maria and Valentina. I... I had sort of a row with Maria yesterday; I'm worried that I hurt her feelings."

"No need for that, little lady." He cajoles, even as it seems as if he's suddenly desperate to be away from me. "I, uh... Think the young miss just needed a bit ta cool off; you know, 'cause'a yer argument. Things happen, 'specially when you two're's close as ya're." He's actually inching away from me, as if I'm a snarling wolf separating him from his destination.

"What about my parents? I- I really haven't been seeing them lately."

"Oh, fine, fine. Just spoke to the missus today, ya know." He doesn't lie any further to me; there's no encouraging platitude about mother's condition.

"I see."

"Keep doin' whatever 'tis you're doin' with yer lovely governess." A pensive moment. "Looks 'lot like what I 'member from my time in th'east. You practicin' that chink boxin'?" There's no suggestion of disapproval, unlike what I'd doubtlessly confront from mother if she were to ever discover it.

"It's a dance." A perfectly genial lie from Xi Go, which inspires a blossoming sense of utter adoration. "It's taught to young ladies of high standing in my country."

"Oh. Looks awful hard, whate'er it is." With considerable relief, he departs, before returning with a slightly guilty smile.

"Vasilevich?"

"Oh... Well, 'cause yer gonna hear 'bout it 'ventually, I thought you might wanna hear it from old Vasi. Yer folks're bringin' a boy over fer ya to meet." Vasilevich seems as exuberant as I am about that, a sullen scowl creasing his face. "T'ain't nothin' 'portant, 'm sure; some Englishman's son, think that he might wanna meet ya. Or his folks wan' him ta meet ya, anyways." My own face is a mask of anguished incredulity; it's as if this is the fruition of a horror that I'd prayed would never materialize, a phantasmagoria that's been cloaked in flesh and ushered to my door.

"I see."

"Y'ain't gonna marry no Brit sissy, that's fer sure, ya wanna ask me 'bout it, little lady." He snarls. "My little lady's gotta marry a real man." I conceal my abject horror at that notion, as well, simply favoring him with a suitably patronizing and hopelessly unpersuasive smile. "'M sure the cap'n'll agree. Must just be some social nicety. You know what I think 'bout them."

"I do."

"Well, gonna see to those lazy lads. They still ain't up at this hour, you can believe it. Why, when I was in the service, they'd put you inna bed with the captain's daughter 'f they found ya lazin' 'round like that. 'N believe you me, she weren't no beauty or a pleasure." A dark chuckle as he hobbles away, rising to what I can only consider a wondrously ominous and diabolical cadence.

"_S-Shego_." I'm consumed by a sudden panic, any concern for controlling my breath evaporating with the notion of this blissful attachment being ruptured by anything so awful. Her tender features, softened with the most beauteously delicate smile I've ever confronted, soothe me; I relax immediately as the warmth of her hand settles upon my shoulder. "I can't do this."

"Kimberly, everything will be fine." She cajoles. "Like he said, it's just a formality. It's probably the son of one of your father's business colleagues; it's likely just a social call."

"I hope." I earnestly, desperately do. I'm positively terrified at the prospect of being forced into an engagement, betrothed like some political wife for my father's growing empire. "I- I can't bear the thought of-"

"Breathe, Kimberly." Another hand falls upon my shoulders; I sag with that comforting weight, and she contorts herself to peer into my eyes with a reassuring warmth. "Breathe."

With a deep intake of the brisk morning air, I return to the dance.


	6. Visitor

"Excellent, Kimberly." Despite Xi Go's exaggerated exuberance, I can't overcome a sense of complete failure. She's wholly unaffected by our languorous pace, every breath flawlessly moderated, the level and regular rise and fall of her chest a taunting companion to her unstrained features. She offers me unyielding smiles, her dark eyes alight with a beauteous tenderness; every word of encouragement, and every command, is spoken with the utmost clarity and ease.

"I-" I can't complete even a single sentence; words beyond the monosyllabic presently elude me as I pant and gasp, my heart thundering with a timpani ferocity in my chest as my lungs shriek with a molten, blazing anguish. Every limb is leaden, struggling to manage even the subtlest trace of control and coordination, even as she's begun to quicken her own strokes, seemingly without thought or regard for how hideously challenging this evidently casual pace is for me.

"_S-Shego_-" Another anguished swelling of breath; her sole response is a level glide of her outstretched palm, retracting it with a grace that I could only consider paradoxical: a supreme rigidity overtakes her with every motion, and yet her body flows with a preternatural elegance, as if she's animated stone. Perhaps that's the source of that odd impression that I have of the dance; that every motion is so expert, so controlled, that it simply ignores the inconvenient, intervening motions that are devouring every semblance of strength within my body. It's so deft that it's virtually a bodily legerdemain, well beyond the perception of my increasingly sluggish and sweat-misted senses.

Tears of that miserable, stinging moisture roll in scouring streams across my blazing skin; my forehead is awash in what seems virtually a standing pool of it, even the most infinitesimal shift forcing a further, sloshing deluge of it into my eyes. A roiling, vermillion flush devours every inch of my flesh; Xi Go's pale complexion remains as fine and untarnished as porcelain, occasionally dimpled with the minutest prickle of sweat. They're tiny and elegant pearls, however; mine are monstrous welters that bruise as they vault across my tortured body.

"Breathe, Kimberly." She lectures with supremely unhurried patience. Illustratively, she draws exaggerated intakes of the air that's increasingly become the arid hell of a furnace, cooling to a blissful arctic splendor with the occasional, sublime breezes that rustle through the courtyard. "Draw a breath as you recoil, and exhale as you strike; exhale and inhale. Breath control is indispensable to balancing your _qi_."

"I know." I wheeze; such an alien term has now become as intimate as the glimmering splendor of her eyes. _Qi_; that unique and impossibly nebulous essence of the divine, the universe captured in a single breath of air. Xi Go has succeeded in integrating our lessons into this nightmare exercise that she approaches as if merely a comfortable jaunt across the stone that's become dappled with perspiration beneath my aching and strained feet. I've nevertheless the sense of being awash in the exotic; of _qi_, cinnabar fields, and the transcendental forces that lie within even the most prosaic of beings.

"Outstanding." It's become less arduous, even as this endures interminably; it may have been days or merely minutes of this repetitive, crippling training, but the cadence of this rending pain remains constant. Perhaps that's encouraging; then again, I may simply be numb with agony.

"W-why is, is this so simple for you?" That she's a sorceress and obviously sublimely versed in this technique should be a self-evident answer, but it continues to gnaw infuriatingly at me.

"I've learned to breathe correctly, and to move in time with those tidal forces of the body." Another unfailingly gentle explanation; it's little comfort to me, panting in a less than demure manner while my clothing becomes sodden with horrid deluges of sweat. I don't believe I've ever perspired in this manner; the delicate welling upon my brow with the blistering caress of bathwater or the heady, throbbing heat that would coruscate through my body with Ariadne's presence is merely a teacup against an ocean.

I deign not to bother commenting upon the obvious, simply refocusing my efforts in reining in those fugitive gasps that arise of their own volition; it's as if I'm breathing twice of thrice for every conscious intake of that swollen, fragrant air, and it's positively maddening. Occasionally, I feel that struggling agony's grip slacken almost unaccountably as I succeed in pairing my breath with each stroke; it's a blissful moment of revelation, as if the divine itself has begun to permeate every fiber of my being, until I'm expelled from that effortless Eden as I falter.

"Kimberly?" Her dulcet tones trickle through the tortured haze of my bleary and disoriented thoughts. I've sought to reduce it to nothing but a regular and mindless pattern: retract and breathe, exhale and strike; retract and breathe, exhale and strike. My eyes are sightless, my flesh numb stone; my muscles are flaccid threads, drawn taut with pure force of will with the flight of every trace of strength. My lungs continue to scream out in desperate protest as I moderate my breath in the most achingly unnatural manner possible. An odd delirium has settled over me.

"Y-yes." I don't believe that I can cope with any further deepening of the challenge or complexity of this pattern, but I manage a halting reply.

"You're performing so well, Kimberly." She seems awed, which is assuredly not praise that I expected to confront with such authentic rapture. I can feel my body swell with a flush of renewed strength, though my eyes remain blind, my very being narrowing to little more than that chronic, unfaltering rhythm and the awareness of her wondrous warmth beside me.

"Thank you." I'm astonished that I can actually speak; that sudden epiphany that I'm no longer so brutally tortured by each shredding breath seems to rupture whatever meditative trance in which I've discovered myself, and the agony reasserts itself with an absolutely brutal flourish. My strangled scream restores my sight, wreathed with a raw and angry crimson aura; my hands have begun to quaver, my entire body wracked with a vengeful swell of anguish.

"K-Kimberly!" Her hands fall upon me, and the pain evaporates at once; so too do the lingering vestiges of that impossible and transcendental focus. "I think that's probably enough for today. You shouldn't overextend yourself."

"A-all right." Another miserable and ragged wheeze. Startlingly, I haven't yet collapsed to the ancient stone, even as my very existence seems to implode upon itself, my vision swimming and my mind blearily reeling.

"That was exceptional, Kimberly. I felt the focus that you achieved." It wasn't merely an illusion. That revelation inspires a weary crease of a smile across my parched and aching lips.

"D-did you? I thought it was just an illusion." My voice is distant, indistinct to my own senses, as if heard beyond a gauzy and distorting veil.

"No." An emphatic reply. It occurs to me rather suddenly that her slim fingers have fastened upon my biceps, that wondrous, blissful warmth radiating through my flesh even through the excruciatingly damp barrier of the once crisp and pristine fabric. Xi Go has refused to permit it to be laundered since launching our instruction; the glistening, diamond splendor and clarity of its once incomparably luminous alabaster majesty has become a tarnished and dull ivory, a tangible reflection of the struggle and ordeal that I've invested in these focusing tortures. Hers, predictably, has remained a paragon of delicate and luminous beauty; merely the minutest traces of perspiration have caressed that glorious fabric since she began instructing me, seeming to evaporate into nothingness upon its pure magnificence.

"It wasn't an illusion." Xi Go reaffirms. As my body sags with a debilitating weariness, reality seems to distort itself; she, at once, appears to loom massively above me, the disparity of our heights magnified to an impossible extremity as she becomes a beauteous giant. It's as if I'm retracting into my body, my eyes suctioned into some deep, cavernous core from which merely the narrowest shaft of reality, enormous and distorted, can be glimpsed.

"I'm extremely proud of you, Kimberly." That sonorous splendor permeates even the distant void into which it seems I've plunged, coaxing a rapturous and beatific smile from me that I can feel even through the anesthetic haze that's arisen with her caress. Her hands support me with an unyielding strength, the sloe magnificence greeting me at the apex of that narrow and shuddering shaft alight with a bliss that lifts me to impossible pinnacles of rapture.

"A-are you?" Another weary and distant ghost of a whisper from my ragged throat.

"Enormously. I felt it, at that very instant; the perfect control that you exercised over your _qi_." A slightly solemn quirking of those lovely, voluptuous lips. "I wish that I hadn't spoken; I was just so excited."

"I shouldn't have." A laconic murmur. It was ridiculous for me to have spoken, rupturing the flawless cadence of my breath; her words had merely invigorated me, inspiring me to heights of clarity and meditative concentration that I hadn't even begun to approach without the impetus of that beauteous voice. "It was such an odd sensation."

"I would imagine so." I'm rather astonished by the mild, virtually girlish giggle that issues from Xi Go as her features adopt a curiously distant cast, as if pondering some distant past. "I was terrified when I finally achieved it; that sense of complete emptiness. I was afraid that I was dying."

"B-but... I wasn't, was I?" Every evening, overcome by a crushing and savage exhaustion, my thoughts have drifted toward the the horrific revelation with which Xi Go confronted me that surreal morning; the notion of having embraced death so effortlessly, as if frivolously bridging the gap between existence and oblivion. My eyes flutter closed, a featureless darkness devouring me, even as the sun begins its weary descent beneath the garden's solemn horizon; luminous gilded flares consumed by a sullen and sublime violet ushering me into slumber that's little more than a flickering blink of time.

I find myself awakened each morning with the unique and singular rapture of Xi Go's voice caressing my name; a perennial, ecstatic refrain of 'Kimberly'. Three days have progressed in that fashion, and it seems more surreal than the most bizarre and impossible of dreams; and yet that unreality has become more powerful and meaningful to me than the banality that once gripped me, that once blinded my eyes with its stultifying normality and rendered me deaf to the primal, visceral rhythms of life. Such artificial order, I've begun to discover, is merely a fragile delusion; a self-inflicted, consensual hallucination that blankets one's senses with the lies that defy the self-evident glory of what lies beyond such a fragile shroud of deception.

"Dying?" Time has increasingly appeared malleable and hopelessly mutable; that seemingly interminable spans will be subsumed with a single breath, even as the most ephemeral of instants unfolds across hours.

"Yes."

"No, Kimberly, you weren't dying. That was..." A pensive moment, as she ponders her words. "That was an extraordinary moment of transformation; a distant memory that was asserting itself in the void of the preparation that you truly require to endure it." Another hopelessly forthright, almost scientific, explanation that is as cryptic as the essence of the divine.

"What had I done, then?" Xi Go's instructions have become more arcane and intricate; tomes of indecipherable characters read with a bewildering mental alacrity, her translations and didactics rife with the untranslatable. I've struggled to maintain my grip upon anything, even as those enigmas become ever more agonizingly elusive.

"You were balancing your breath; controlling and reining in the turbulence of your chest. You were bringing one of the cinnabar fields into proper alignment, arranging your internal cosmology toward the end of perfection." Within these endless three days, I've also glimpsed what I could only have once considered the heretical; the ineffable essence of god distilled into alchemical formulae and incantations; a singular and indivisible divinity carved asunder into vast constellations of deities and forces, of gods, demons, monsters, and rippling essences of the sublime that writhe with a tangible life and grandeur, rather than hovering beyond this plane as a distant and untouchable father. Time and space are being lain bare to me with her diligent and patient tutelage; the abstract and impossibly knotted are progressively unfolding with a remarkable clarity.

Often, I've the sense, perhaps the certainty, that I'm merely revisiting these familiar truths that some distant reach of my mind has mastered with extraordinary regularity; that the transcendental is as intimate a companion as the sensuous, throbbing ache of my tortured body.

"That's..." Could mere words suffice to reply to something so extraordinary?

"As you achieve control over those fields, the circulation of breath becomes elixir." The languid stoke of Xi Go's delicate fingers along the rustling fabric, stiffening with my drying sweat, begins to draw me forth from that distant and delirious oblivion. Reality progressively renews its more familiar definition, even as my sight is wreathed with a diaphanous mist that parts solely for the luminous splendor of her smile. As the wondrous strains of her voice deliver such a mystic pedagogy, her eyes remain fixed with mine; the words seem of virtually no substance whatsoever as my gaze devours her own. It's a peculiar sense of mutual consumption, recycled into the infinite; of her warmth enveloping me even as I claim her, reflected again and again within the infinite, shimmering mirrored pools of our eyes.

I can feel her impossibly near to me, that peculiar haze suddenly draping everything, forcing her into the most majestically clarified focus; any sense of distance dissolves, and I discover myself inching nearer and nearer, with a cringing, frustrated ponderousness, as if time has begun to slow merely to torment me. Even as my pulse roars through my ears, I'm overcome by an impossibly serene composure; my parched lips part; my fingers tense and relax; my entire body writhes with a blissful electricity. My thoughts are of nothing but Xi Go; amid that delirium, I've brief, flickering glimpses of the impossible, of the utterly sublime.

My chest heaves with a molten, hitching breath, a sudden and unaccountable warmth thundering through my body; pooling with such a glorious and impossible immensity in the pit of my stomach, and trickling lower and lower, a quaking and familiar dampness lunging forth as if dew upon a flowering blossom in its wake.

"_Shego_." My voice comes as a tremulous whisper, and yet seems a howl amid the abrupt onset of complete and supernatural silence. It's as if the world has ceased to be beyond our embrace; my thoughts can only be of her, and I embrace that. I love that. My mind supplies distant and gauzy images of unparalleled power; they seem to throb from distant lives, of brief caresses and flickering glances that my delirious and fevered brain cannot even begin to grasp.

"K-Kimberly." Again, extraordinarily, she seems astounded; a prickling spurt of an oddly exhilarating pain lances through my arms with the sudden tensing of her fingers, as if talons have sprouted from them, piercing my achingly hypersensitive flesh.

"_Shego_." I repeat, tone husky and quivering with that yammering, inarticulate demand that shudders from within me. A distant and bleary fringe of my thoughts recognizes it as so similar to those evenings in Ariadne's sheltering embrace, overcome by a yearning to close those remaining few inches separating our lips. It was never so urgent then, however; never tinged with that raw, crimson desperation, a simmering mist rippling across my sight and bitterly rending my body with every instant its furious commands are denied.

"Kimberly, I... I don't think-" Her voice is alight with a shivering trepidation; I've never confronted this, and it's oddly electrifying. I feel so fragile, so vulnerable, in her arms; and yet she seems all the more so, invigorating some visceral and unutterable compulsion that's begun to roar from the deepest and most primal reaches of my soul.

"Please." What I'm begging of her, I haven't the slightest inkling; but I cannot restrain that plea, hoping that it will kindle some understanding.

"Kimberly." Xi Go is truly breathless, as I am; I feel her pulse racing through her hands, her milky cheeks tinged with a fine and bewitching flush. "We- we shouldn't-"

"I miss you." My hands have tensed into agonizing, trembling fists; that distant sensation has become more immediate, more powerful, and more pressing. The words that I speak emerge without any thought, without any awareness of my increasingly disoriented and reeling mind; they issue from the depths of my soul, flow from the distant reaches of my spirit that seems as alien as the silver glimmer of the moon. "I need you."

"Kimberly... I- I told you that you'd begin to feel, to feel..." Xi Go's words quiver, rippling with a livid intensity as she struggles to restrain herself with a truly palpable tension. "To feel unfamiliar and strange things." She finally, unpersuasively, concludes.

"These aren't unfamiliar." I whimper, truly desperate with this surreal and gnawing desire. I feel as if they've taunted me with brief, ghosting flares throughout the whole of my life, finally roaring into furious definition in Xi Go's wondrous presence. "Please."

"I- I can't." Her eyes are suddenly enormous and shimmering, a struggle against her own desires manifest in that darkened gaze. "Kimberly, please, I-"

"Please." A cringing, straining spasm arcs through me, and it's absolutely intolerable. "Please. Please. Please." The certainty that I'm upon the cusp of tears is overshadowed by the sudden, pliant heat of her lips against mine. At once, her body is overtaken by the rigidity of a stone, those wondrous sloe pools widening to impossible proportions as my mouth finds hers, guided by an irresistible, primal current that washes with overpowering intensity through me. I realize that I've been visualizing this for weeks; the pliant, yielding heat of that singular, dark voluptuousness.

It's risen into sudden and undeniable reality, that achingly awkward embrace seemingly drawn from the romances that mother had forbidden me to read. I'm not a prince; she isn't; and yet it's truly, utterly perfect. My lips linger upon hers even as her grasp tenses around my arms. Xi Go seems to dissolve beneath that trepiditious, questing pressure; I feel virtually frozen with a shuddering heat sheathed in an impossible, coruscating electricity. It's the most extraordinary and incomparable sensation I've ever experienced; it lances through me, burning along every nerve with a fury that words could not possibly hope to capture, even as it lifts the inferno swelling through my body to an impossible, soaring height.

I've kissed her; somehow, even as I pondered that, even as I pined for Ariadne's warmth, it had never quite occurred to me that it would be a kiss. I had never even considered that it would be possible; that a woman could kiss another, that it would be alight with such an impossible, soaring rapture. I love this; I love that sensation, that incomparable intimacy, that blistering, supple glory beneath my own lips. They barely part, and I'm certain that she'll speak, or draw breath; but they ease asunder merely the minutest of distances, as if expecting something further. My sole desire is to continue this; to continue kissing her. To kiss Xi Go.

"Kimberly." The realization that we've parted strikes me with the savage force of a wayward locomotive; it's a rending epiphany, particularly as she takes no action to kiss me, to draw any nearer to my lips from this excruciating distance. "Kimberly, I-" There's something indefinable upon her features; an expression of grief defying words, of a sorrow that sends a scalding mist of tears into my eyes. "Kimberly, I-"

"Kiss me." I can finally give voice to even the minutest shred of those roiling and unfathomable emotions rioting within me. "Please, kiss me."

"Kimberly, I cannot-"

"Please." I beg, though I understand that it's futile even as that word continues to lunge from my lips that continue to blaze with the lingering heat of her own.

"This... This is... I..." It's obvious; she believes that I'm awful, that I'm monstrous and revolting. She must think that I'm ill; perhaps that I'm diseased.

That I'm sinful. I reel with that, my jaw trembling as my lips contort in a desperate struggle to form anything resembling a coherent word. I fail, beginning to weep; wracking, anguished sobs cascade from me, my chest heaving with an impossible grief. Everything that lies within me seemed to direct me to that, to her; those distant and half-understood thoughts, those pleading emotions. Everything was perfect; that intimacy seemed so complete, so absolute. It was natural and wonderful and I've completely ruined myself, destroyed my bond with her.

I'm blind, tears scouring across my cheeks in hellish streams as my feet carry me toward destinations known only to them. A thundering tattoo of bare soles upon wood resonates through my senses, and I realize that I'm returning to my bedchambers; the door slams beneath my groping hands, the crisp splendor of silk sheets lacerating, barbed agony against my skin as I plunge my face into the pillow.

My sobs resound through the room, and I begin to plead for this merely to be a dream; or that, perhaps, Xi Go's tentative rap will sound upon the wooden portal, that she'll explain that it was merely a misunderstanding.

That never arises as I weep and weep, as my tears stain the porcelain majesty of the fabric. Even that aggrieves me; it's of the flawless, alabaster perfection of Xi Go's skin. I've longed to feel it beneath my fingers, simply to allow them to play without restraint across its unblemished magnificence. I'll never be allowed that; she'll never wish to be near to me again. Perhaps she'll no longer be my governess.

That notion inspires a renewed, wracking stream of cries from me. She'll tell mother, as well, naturally; my entire life will be destroyed. Mother will think it vile and unchristian; even father will agree. She was right to disdain my intimacy with Ariadne; perhaps Ariadne thought the same, and merely humored me.

"I hate... I... I hate..." I don't know what I hate; 'this'; 'everything'. "I hate myself." I finally, pathetically conclude, more certain than I ever have been that I truly am cursed. God must have forsaken me; this must merely exist to lead me further and further away from his light. This is punishment for accepting that mysticism, for being bewitched and entranced by Xi Go and her beauty; by what must be this awful and unnatural feeling shuddering through me.

It continues to torture me, tearing at my senses, a throbbing and excruciating heat between my thighs, simmering within my breast, boiling within my stomach. My chest aches as if it's been pierced, and yet, as my heart feels as if it will explode, as my soul shrieks with a wailing grief that I could never possibly have envisioned, it gnaws at me. It must be the harvest of my sin, of my evil, of everything that's wrong with me. That temptation, that... That awfulness that Xi Go must have glimpsed within me.

It hurts so terribly; it blazes and shudders, commanding the touch of my hands again, even at this waking hour. They clasp upon my chest as I lie upon the bed, sightless eyes swimming with tears that render the dark rafters a whorling swirl of distortion. My thighs begin to grind together with a renewed vigor, an electric, agonizing bliss torturing my nerves with every gasping stroke against that indescribable core.

"_Shego_." My lips, now bruised and agonized, caress that word as if a divine mantra; a liturgy of grief and yearning, pleading for her to return to me. Even to return to that one moment, to restrain myself, not to commit that unspeakable and pernicious error. The thought, the certainty, of being deprived of her galls at me; it shears through everything, more terrible than death itself.

"_Shego_." A shivering, scalding intensity is mounting within me, seeming to swell through my body; an arctic flame laps at every nerve, pressing me further and further toward some uncertain pinnacle that I crave and dread at once.

"_Shego_." I beg for her to rejoin me; I've begun to clamor for her to unite with me in this. The sense that she will guide me toward some transcendence in this ecstatic thrall is so complete that I cannot resist it any further. As it is, however, I feel impossibly near to a sense of death; I prepare to surrender to it, whimpering and sobbing, before my concentration is shattered by a deft series of crisp raps against the door.

"_Shego_!" That arises as a pining gasp; tears continue to stream along my cheeks, and I simply cannot rise, enervated with grief and disappointment.

"Ah... Miss Kimberly?" It's not Xi Go; it's as if my breast has been pierced anew with a blazing lance. It's Chang; that peculiar affectation is unmistakable. "Miss Kimberly? Are you there?"

"Yes." I cannot cry; I cannot betray the slightest shred of emotion. I... I'm an upstanding, good, Christian girl; I am Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym. "Yes, I am."

"It is Chang." As I'd presumed. "Your mother, Lady Vozmozhnym, requests your company this afternoon in the main household."

"I- I see." Those words emerge as an unintelligible whisper, and yet Chang continues as if they'd been shouted with flawless clarity.

"I do not desire to disturb you, Miss Kimberly, but she was most insistent. A guest is expected this afternoon; several in fact. It is hoped that you will grace them with your presence." Such a disorientingly formal phrasing, as if he's an obsequious courtly servant. "Is governess Go Xi," his pronunciation is bizarre, "With you?"

"No." That single word is more excruciating than the accumulated, bruising agony shuddering through me from her instruction; beyond the wrenching anguish of Maria's rejection; eclipsing even my parting from Ariadne, from Saint Petersburg. I'm not with her; I probably never will be again. Regardless of whatever destiny may bind us, that has sundered us; a savage, relentless certainty of that tortures me.

"I see." I can visualize him bowing with that acknowledgment. "Will you be prepared, Miss Kimberly, or shall I instruct one of the servants to aid you?"

"I'll- I'll be fine." I've been perfectly capable of bathing myself, even as I've silently pined for Xi Go to do so. Dressing hasn't been a particularly arduous task, either; it's routinely been a transition from the garment that now droops upon me with a sullen, damp misery to a dressing gown or that wondrous _zanze_.

"Very well." A beat. "Do you require-"

"No!" That startles me, what I intended to be a solemn refusal swelling into a shout that rolls deafeningly across my ragged senses.

"I- I see. Very well, then, Miss Kimberly. Our guests are expected at three-thirty. Please, do be prepared by that point, or I fear that Lady Vozmozhnym will be most displeased."

"Very well." I echo with a harsh and acid bitterness. A vicious and unbearable spite roils within me, however shameful that feels as it cools the moment that cruel fury is voiced. There is no answer, however, and I've the sense that Chang has again drifted away with his characteristic supernatural silence. "Very well." I repeat; it emerges as a pathetic, anemic whisper, tinged anew with a shuddering grief that arises the instant that the onerous burden of existing as the proper, upstanding Kimberly Dmitriovna evaporates.

"_Shego_." I whisper that name, again and again, as if an incantation against the blazing tears that writhe across my sight, or the knifing anguish that throbs unrelentingly within my breast. It merely seems to conjure it with deeper and more brutal intensity as my lips form that word without relent, every syllable shearing away a further shard of the hopelessly fantastic future that I'd attached to it. It was never a coherent image until that abrupt, jarring misery raised it into such harsh relief, as if unearthed from the sands of my own imagination by a deluge of tears.

This is a further agony, a deeper and more pathetic insult, the notion of being subjected to some interminable, grinding engagement with an Englishman's son; doubtlessly some indulgent, delusional patrician who can't muster a single word of Russian, who will entertain fantasies whose merest suggestion instills me with the utmost, cringing disgust. I've begun to yearn for the dissolution of this world, for the sun to tumble from the sky, bathing this hideous, nightmare reality in an eternal, unwavering darkness, so complete and absolute as to blot my very being from this plane. It's a suitably selfish and romantic notion, I suppose; so too is the image of my simply submerging myself within the roiling waters of the bath, never to emerge again.

I'm not Ophelia, however, it occurs to me; I lack the courage, the strength to effect such an extraordinary gesture. I lacked the strength to even restrain myself with Xi Go, much less to bind her to me with the sheer force of my adoration, to vow my... My love for her.

It doesn't arise as a cataclysmic epiphany; that word is merely the abstract reflection of the emotions that have simmered within me since the moment my gaze fell upon her otherworldly splendor, the luminous and irresistibly sublime aura that rippled and pulsed from her with supernatural intensity. I've loved her with an impossible intensity since the first glimpse of her wondrous, full lips quirked into that singular smile that she reserves wholly for me; since the seething, coruscating flood of that incomparable electricity cascaded through me beneath the mildest of caresses, or with the wondrous envelopment of her arms.

With everything that we've experienced, now, it seems impossible that she'd reject me for that; and yet she has. Despite her conviction to guide me, to resurrect those transcendental memories, that continuity of life that feels as if it's spanned ages, that merest brush of lips sundered her eternally from me, and I can't even begin to understand why; why she would now reject me, cast me away from her sheltering embrace. Am I that repugnant, that... That sinful?

My body protests with a rending anguish as I struggle to wrest myself from the folds of the crumpled and wadded bedding; the pain rippling through my soul has intensified the cringing, raw torture of my battered and exhausted body. Fine seams of scarlet striations pulse angrily from beneath my pallid skin; plum blotches of bruises mark those areas of such intimate ferocity, her hands and feet battering against my fragile flesh as we exchange blows. My chest aches and strains with even the minutest breath, and yet I manage to rise to feet that have begun to cry out with similarly vociferous protest with a furious, rushing inhalation.

It occurs to me that I'll likely never master such mystical techniques without her patient and singular tutelage. It shouldn't bother me with her vanishment, but the notion of being deprived of such a revelation inspires a further, lancing swell of sorrow. My immediate concern, however, is discovering the time. For the preceding few weeks, I've relied wholly upon the glorious, natural cycle of the sun and moon; the sole gauge of any relevance the gentle, creeping encroachment of blazing, gilded rays into the infinite murk of the garden's vast shadows. Now, as I shuffle with a laborious, groaning effort across the floor, my soles pounding a supremely inelegant, coarse rhythm along the wood, such an abstract trifle is again relevant.

A further, sighing struggle permits me access to one of the stout, gorgeously inlaid chests; its gilded majesty hardly touches my sight beyond a mild tingle of aggravation at how implausibly prosaic such an unnatural contrivance is by contrast with the untamed magnificence of the garden. At once, the relentless, hammering rattle of the mechanism assails my supremely hypersensitive ears, and I discover the startlingly acuity of my eyes as the dials arise in astonishing relief from the darkness of its bowels; it's one-thirty-two.

Mulling the likely interminable misery of the intervening two hours, it doesn't even occur to me that I'm no longer alone until I begin to shed that clinging, stiffening sheath of discolored cotton, wondering if I'll ever don it again. So accustomed am I to that vague, niggling suggestion of human warmth that a sudden, squealing cry wrenches itself from my ragged throat when I finally notice it.

"_S-Shego_!" I shiver despite myself with the languid caress of an errant breeze, perfumed with the complex floral delights of the garden, across my now bared shoulders and chest. My quivering hands are unable to conjure the coordination to refasten it across my body, and they simply fall to my sides as I'm convulsed with a quaking shudder.

"Yes, Kimberly." Her pale features are darkened with an extraordinary emotion; I notice that her sloe eyes are ringed with a subtle suggestion of crimson, and a minute dampness shimmers upon her cheeks.

"P-please, just leave. I- I... I need to change for..." I can't even recall why; it's as if my direst nightmares and most desperately, furtively stewarded fantasies have been fulfilled at once.

"I'm sorry." A severe incline of her head in what seems an almost theatrical bow. She approaches haltingly; a step, and another, suddenly so thunderously intense amid the agonizing silence.

"Please, I need-"

"No, Kimberly. Please, listen to me. Please." Xi Go's voice is husky, deep, hypnotically severe even as it's wracked with a remarkable solemnity. I find myself settling into my characteristic perch upon the bed, my hands clasped awkwardly atop my lap. I'm unable to speak; it's as if she's paralyzed me with those words, which she may actually have.

"I'm sorry that I... That I reacted as I did. You have to understand that."

"You hate me." Regardless of whatever incantation with which she's bewitched me, nothing can suppress that cringing whimper. "Why don't you just leave?"

"I don't hate you!" Any semblance of calm, any pretension of patience, dissolves from Xi Go's suddenly fierce voice. She wrings a pitiful squeak from me as her hands fasten upon my wrists, wrenching me agonizingly to my feet. "I don't hate you." She repeats, her tone harsh and raw, bereft of her characteristic quietly assertive composure. "I don't hate you."

"Then, why?"

"I was terrified, Kimberly. You- you startled me. I didn't know what to say or do." I don't believe her; I simply cannot. And, yet, her sullen gaze has begun to alight with that impossible, fulminating emerald. "I... I vowed not to hurry you, to force you; to impose any expectation upon you. And... And, then you kissed me." At that, I avert my eyes from hers, until the irresistible force of her slender fingers upon my jaw forces our gazes into an unyielding union. "I was prepared to wait for an eternity for you; for you to regain your memories, your power, everything... I didn't expect that."

It's my opportunity to reel again with a sickly swell of confusion.

"So, I... I was afraid that you'd think that I had bewitched you, or misled you, or taken advantage of you. I was stupid; I didn't think for a moment that... That you might truly wish that, as well, in your present state. I've become so fixated upon preserving this unnatural distance for your sake that I didn't even realize that you'd bridged it without my prompting.

"So, I... I'm sorry." A beat. "I'm sorry, Kimberly. I feel terribly ashamed of myself."

"You... You don't hate me?" I barely absorbed a single word that issued from her following that first, glorious sentence, and the sense of utter surreality has yet to recede.

"No."

"But, I... I'm terrible, and sick, and..." A blazing, shameful flush sears a sickly swath across my face. "I'm sinful."

"What?" Xi Go is incredulous, her fingers briefly tensing with savage intensity upon my skin.

"It's- it's sinful. You said that-"

"That others might think that, yes, in a society like your own. But, Kimberly," Xi Go offers me a sidelong glance pregnant with a peculiar melding of frustration, amusement, and affection, "That does not matter. There is no sin; there is no need for shame."

"I've... I've been terribly foolish, haven't I?" That fact alone is agonizing; the sense that I was earnestly prepared to drown myself, to scour away every trace of my being with that hopelessly melodramatic, wracking welter of grief. I didn't pause to allow her a single moment to explain; heaving myself into the agony for which I'd been so pathetically preparing myself, I hadn't considered anything.

"Yes, and no." At long last, a gentle quirking of a smile upon her full, blackened lips; it's irresistibly infectious, creeping across my own, a chill of blissful relief cooling the seething embers of my waning grief and torment. "Kimberly... I feel horrendously foolish. Everything is so complicated and surreal, now; nothing is familiar, and nothing is at all like I'd expected."

"Who am I, _Shego_?" I finally demand, overcome by the bewilderment of her discussing the passage of time and the ages as though merely the trickle of seasons.

"Kimberly-"

"_Shego_, please." I implore; we're both astonished to discover my hands lashing out to seize the crisp fabric of her costume, fingers piercing with a shivering desperation into that delicate material. "You speak as if you've lived a thousand years, and I've been beside you for that entire time; that you've been waiting for me to discover memories that will complete me, or..." A harsh, anxious swallow. "Or just replace me with someone else. Who am I? Am I just a shell for another person, or-"

"You're Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym." That name is a sudden, jarring slap of reason; I've been spewing utter nonsense. "You are not an empty vessel, Kimberly; you are you. And that's why I was so achingly reticent to even consider this, much less force you along prematurely."

"But-"

"There is a continuity of the spirit. The soul can bear lingering traces of memory and awareness of its past incarnations, even when the tea of forgetfulness scours away virtually every measure of what lies within our true natures. But, those lives do not cease to be; and one's incarnation will always bear those marks. The Buddhists say it is karma; for me, it is merely the true flow of life in the _Tao_."

"Who am I?" I plead, finding myself agonizingly near to tears again, that frustration overwhelming the buoyant rapture that her return has inspired.

"Kimberly, that is for you to discover."

"But, you know, _Shego_. That's- that's why you're with me, isn't it? I- I'm important to you, aren't I?" An aching swell of insecurity accompanies that tortured, smoldering knot at the pit of my stomach.

"More than you could ever possibly imagine." For the briefest of instants, Xi Go appears truly ancient; not in the cast of her skin, which remains eternally fine and delicate, but the solemn depth of her eyes. They seem virtually cavernous, hollow with accumulated grief upon grief; that question seems to be another agony. "Yes, Kimberly; you are..." A harsh swallow, before she effortlessly seizes my hands, her fingers lacing intractably around mine. "You are important. I could never even hope to explain how important you are."

"Then, tell me. Who am I?" I repeat, almost petulantly.

"I cannot tell you; you cannot learn with words alone. Don't you understand, Kimberly? If telling you would be enough, if you would discover that at once with a mere explanation, I would have the day that I was introduced to you."

"Even still-"

"No." A stern refusal. "There are things that I will tell you when the moment arrives; tangible memories that might not return with the joining and transmigration of spirits and the flow of the soul, but I will not torment you with knowledge that you can discover more intimately and completely within yourself." However childish it is, I'm overcome by a sudden, desperate need to stamp my feet, to wail and rage and shriek with a fulminating, riotous tantrum until she relents, but I realize that she will not.

"Then..." My chest blazes with a severe, heaving intake of breath. "Do not keep me at arm's length. Please." If nothing else, I should be entitled to that demand. I can't bear even the slightest distance any longer; particularly now, as I feel that aching, tentative heat throb and ripple through her with a shivering trepidation that mirrors my own.

"I promise." I feel her ease nearer, and nearer; her heart's furious palpitation becomes a thundering, all-enveloping percussion, that cadence cascading through me in extraordinary synchrony with my own. "I promise you, Kimberly." It's a peculiar moment of resolution, as if two realities are converging at once; Kimberly and Xi Go, student and governess, their acquaintance little more than weeks; and a sense of the utterly transcendent, of spirits intertwined and lives inextricably interwoven throughout eternity.

"Kiss me." I yearn to plead, but she already has, that minute but excruciating separation evaporating in with that peculiar, magical adroitness; my senses can't even perceive that deft flicker until her lips swallow the low, keening whimper spilling from my throat, my eyes widening and falling closed with that transcendental warmth. They flutter open to discover that it isn't merely a dream, or a pitiful and fragile fantasy. Her hands tenderly clasp mine, that sublime and pliant heat lingering upon mine for a glorious, breathless eternity until we part with a final, rapturous gasp.

"_Shego_." My voice is shot with a spectacular tremor, raw and husky.

"I've... I've wanted to do that for an eternity, since the moment my eyes fell upon you, Kimberly." That voluptuous darkness glistens with a fine sheen of glorious dampness, and I'm overcome by a longing to capture it anew.

"As... As have I." I admit, my voice brittle and hopelessly, pathetically tiny. Even as my mind reels with this, however, a deeper, throbbing heat begins to boil through me anew; more powerful than anything I've ever experienced, it swells and soars without pause, every inch of my body blazing with a seething hypersensitivity. It's as if every nerve has flared into impossible and bewildering life, awakening to a sensual, all-consuming existence that has eluded me behind a curtain of desperate and ignorant repression. "I never thought that you would."

"I'm glad that you did." A quiet, almost girlish giggle, and I, at long last, conjure the courage to kiss her again. It's... It's not quite that aching, shy trepidation of that first, desperate instant; it's gentler, unhurried, finally savoring the singular splendor of her lips upon my own. Time seems to slow to accommodate my yearning to experience every minute detail of the fine, sleek texture of that pliant and delicate, yielding warmth; her fingers tensing gently around mine, as if restraining herself from truly plundering me like a romantic hero... Or heroine, it occurs to me with a delirious and slightly drunken epiphany.

"That's so wonderful." A breathless gasp. "That's... That's extraordinary. I... You'll probably think me perfectly stupid, but I..." My voice dips to a bashful whisper. "I didn't even know that- that girls could do that." I'm prepared for the ensuing giggle, but it doesn't render it any less mortifying, though I somehow embrace even that wondrous flaring of sensation. It seems to confirm that I'm alive, that this isn't merely another torturous fantasy or elusive, fleeting dream.

"They can, indeed, Kimberly." A luminous smile, and she kisses me again, and again; I fall into her arms, those sleek and powerful limbs fastening around my trembling body with an impossible gentleness. I feel as if we're melding together, inseparably blending into a single soul. Every brush, every gentle, tender, tantalizing glide and caress of flesh is more wondrous than the last. I feel as if each kiss is another gashing stroke upon my sanity, shearing away every trace of my presence of mind until nothing remains but a trembling, panting heap of writhing sensation.

When we finally part, it's as if a diver surfacing from the deepest ocean, gasping deep intakes of air perfumed with her incomparable scent. My eyes glisten with a mist of tears that I barely even notice until she releases one of my hands, brushing away the beading moisture.

"You're crying." Xi Go whispers to me, the delicate dampness of her breath rustling rapturously across my cheek.

"I know. I'm so happy." And I am; nothing could destroy this moment. Truly nothing; not even the awareness of some abhorrent, looming engagement with a boy. Not an encounter with my parents; not even the knowledge of the world's imminent end. "I'm so happy, _Shego_. I'm..." I'm yours; completely, utterly yours. I pledge myself to you; I yearn to be yours. Every pining sigh, every girlish and silly fantasy that those childish romances inspired... Everything is merely the most pathetic wisp of the feeblest flicker of this roaring flame that unfolds in my breast.

"I know." The delicate warmth of her palm closes upon my cheek, and I find myself leaning with a fervent need into that heat, eyes fluttering closed. I don't notice anything; not even the crisp breeze drifting along my bare shoulders or the certainty of my nakedness fazes me.

"Thank you, _Shego_."

"Thank you, Kimberly." Another gentle giggle. That sense of utter ancientness subsides, and it's as if she's my age again. Every trace of distance has completely melted away, and I collapse again into her arms, abundantly availing myself of that unyielding, iron strength beneath the silken sheath of her feminine softness. "Still, don't think that I intend to coddle you in your training."

"I hope not." That emerges as a slightly dreamy murmur, but it's no less earnest. I've no intention of abandoning that; quite the contrary, in fact. The notion of being rewarded with those tender caresses, of basking in the warmth of her embrace, of savoring her lips upon mine following every rending, exhausting ordeal... That's extraordinary.

"Oh?"

"If you won't tell me, then I'd like to master everything as quickly as possible." I'm a bit awestruck by my own vigorous conviction, but that kiss has ruptured every self-imposed dam that's restrained the frantic boil of emotions I've permitted to accumulate for those eternal seventeen years of my existence as Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym.

Perhaps I've been yearning for some departure from that; not to be simply a nobleman's daughter, to be a tedious and banal noblewoman in turn, wed to a man that I could never possibly love with anything but the necessity of devotion. I'd yearned for anything to be with Ariadne, and now, as I discover myself in an alien land, I'm pleading for anything to separate me from the crumbling edifice of my family life, of an invisible mother and father and the unremitting, newfound cruelty of my beloved sisters. Everything is pure and perfect and complete in her arms; I feel that I need nothing but that.

"You sound so certain. What you felt today is merely a tiny fragment of the ordeal involved." It's a virtually needling, teasing warning, as if to merely stoke my craving further.

"I know that. I'm eager to embrace that." I am. Somehow, that crushing anguish simply further accentuated the progress that I've achieved; it was a confirmation of my transcending my own feeble limitations, pressing beyond those arbitrary thresholds of proper, upstanding womanhood. I'd never even perspired, much less truly exercised, struggling beyond the boundaries of the soft and feeble, and it's been absolutely exhilarating.

"Is that so, Princess?" Another teasing grin, and I feel my own lips, bruised and tortured further by the sublime, ambrosiac delight of her kiss, quirk into a ludicrous smile.

"I love that. Did- did I ever mention that?" A vermillion flush blooms along my cheeks at that admission.

"It was obvious." A sincere smile. "Incredibly so, Kimberly."

"I'm not surprised." The sudden awareness of that we've been upright throughout the whole of this inspires a massive, quaking weariness, and I begin to buckle in her arms. "I- I'm sorry."

"Why?" She doesn't strain in the slightest to support my complete weight. It's as if, through some impossible act of prestidigitation, my bones have been stripped away, supplanted by some glorious, warm gelatin; I sag into the blissful heat of her all-enveloping, sheltering arms, those slender limbs momentous, angelic wings that isolate me from the commonplace torment of the world.

"For being so fragile."

"I'm glad that you are, Kimberly." I've nestled against the fragrant juncture of her wondrous, swan-like neck and shoulder, avidly savoring the creamy softness of her skin and the exotic scent of her voluminous raven locks; a peculiar floral perfume, tinged with the crisp aroma of her supremely feminine splendor, of the purest and most glorious spring. "It means that I'll be allowed to support you when you fall; to cradle you in my arms when you falter; to hold you when you're overwhelmed and exhausted."

Despite the invigorating flame of pure rapture that ignites within me, I remain as still and limp as I can manage, selfishly delighting in her warmth; the continual, level throb of her heartbeat resonating through me in a percussive symphony; and the regular swell of her chest against my own, soft and pliant.

"Even when you're pretending." I don't bother to protest as her sweet, sonorous laughter rises above her heart's palpitations.

"You're so strong." It's somewhat of an obvious observation, but I've marveled at it since the moment that I confronted even the slightest inkling of her power; that incomparable, supernatural potential that lies beneath the sheer and lovely, feminine softness of her body. I've the sense that she could effortlessly overpower even my father; and Chang, that vaguely sinister monk, seems to recoil in terror at her presence.

"I suppose so." A languorous nod. "But, the strength of the body is trivial by contrast with the power of one's spirit, of the intensity with which the soul blazes. I can feel that within you, Kimberly."

"I feel safe in your arms." And it's not purely that unrivaled physical strength that I know could rend steel as readily as she cradles me with such boundless gentleness. It's the knowledge that she's safeguarding me with her adoration, with this singular affection that coruscates between us with a mystic nexus that I can feel transcending time and life.

Even if we haven't said it, I can feel that love. Perhaps I'd never quite had a grasp upon what love was; this is so powerful, free and unencumbered, a steppe eagle soaring above an infinite horizon, unrestrained by frontier and humanity. It's nothing but a singular, almost delirious purity that inspires a certainty that I can take flight as surely as any bird, lifting her from this plane in my arms with every kiss. I'm astonished that my memories of Ariadne don't vanish amid that blazing splendor; but that heat has somehow cooled to ash, even with the knowledge that I'd felt something so very near to this.

It was if it had been a puzzle nearing completion, approaching that perfection, but without those final, crucial pieces. Xi Go's warmth, her gaze, that blissful contact... She's perfected me, and we mesh together with what feels now to be an effortless magnificence. I love her.

"Well, Princess?"

"Hm?" A vapid murmur. I realize that I've been wandering amid my own blissful delirium for what could be a few moments or an hour.

"I... I heard that you have an engagement today." I can't bring myself to collapse into a weeping, tortured fit of melodramatics, but my scowl isn't quite so cooperative. I deplore the notion of being forced to feign such fatuous normality at a moment of what I could only consider completion, but she'll be with me.

"Only if you're with me."

"Kimberly-"

"You... We don't need to tell my parents, or this young man, but... Well, we'll need a chaperone, won't we?" It should feel frightfully indecent, shouldn't it, to be unescorted with her? I love it.

"A chaperone, Kimberly? Should your..." A contemplative pause, before she settles upon the term that I've yearned to hear from her for what feels an eternity. "Should your lover be your chaperone?" I don't quite grasp the bewildering gravity with which she seems to instill it, but I adore that sense of the forbidden; of embracing, claiming that love without regard for anything but our joy.

"You're my governess, remember?" A vaguely petulant grin creases my lips, as if I've unveiled some transcendental celestial loophole. "Shouldn't my reliable, steadfast governess escort me in the presence of some lascivious young man?" It's a surreal experience, this sense of metamorphosis, as if in the span of mere instants I've transformed into a being totally antithetical to the familiar Kimberly Dmitriovna; that some irrepressible spirit has begun to seep through the fissures in that crumbling facade. It's sublime.

"Somehow, I've the sense that he'd be our chaperone." I confront a truly beauteous laugh, Xi Go's features alighting further and further with every instant in my presence. It's as we've finally been relieved of a truly tangible weight crushing savagely upon our intertwined spirits, a giddy and manic welter of delight flooding forth with its disappearance.

"Oh?" I offer her a thoroughly insane smile, as if my rapture-fevered brain has totally relaxed its grip upon anything approaching sanity.

"Perhaps I should be a little afraid, Kimberly." I love that slightly snide quirking of her glorious raven lips, particularly as the sleek and delicate form of her tongue darts across them; that sight electrifies me, sending a shivering jolt of pure ecstasy coursing through me.

"Why?" I'm suddenly gasping, my voice raw and husky. That sight seems to have transformed my mouth into a desert, and stolen every trace of breath from my chest that's alighted with a blazing fury. Her sloe eyes have darkened further, deepening to an absolutely captivating, limpid black that seems to devour me as it captures my reflection upon its glimmering surface. In a brief blink, that wondrous bodily sleight-of-hand, poetic in its almost jarring grace, places her arms around me again. A faintness of unbelievable, inarticulate craving overtakes me; I suddenly realize how fragile, how utterly oblivious I am in what seems an impossibly expert embrace.

"Well..." Her tone is equally deep, virtually inaudible as her whisper caresses my senses with a glorious and tantalizing, damp splendor.

"Oh, god..." Never have I spoken that with greater earnestness; not even in the throes of the most fervent and pining prayer. To what god that's being addressed, it's difficult to be certain, however. Somehow, I've the sense that its recipient is the goddess of porcelain and ebony that envelops me in her unyielding grasp.

"You're so beautiful." Any measure of gentle teasing evaporates as her lips find mine again, sending my heart thundering in a furious, hammering beat. Nothing could conceivably aspire to capture the sheer intensity of that shivering, boiling rapture that wells into my spirit, that consumes me so utterly in her arms, even as she kisses me again, and again, and again. Not once is it predictable or ordinary; it becomes more transcendentally beautiful, more powerful, more overpowering with each tender and torturously fleeting brush of that singular heat upon me. The first was jarring, startling and a disorienting blur; so too was the second. I can finally begin to approach the vaguest presence of mind as she claims me, and it's utterly wondrous.

"You are." My chest heaves with deep, furious and desperate intakes of breath perfumed with her exotic scent; I'm rather astonished that she's hardly burdened in the slightest, though I assuredly cannot complain about anything so trivial as suffocation as she impatiently kisses me anew.

"Kimberly, you're... You're so extraordinary." My bleary and swimming senses discover Xi Go's slim fingers tracing idly along the small of my back, stroking in an irregular, ragged and anxious pattern along that cruelly damp fabric. That blissful warmth seeps through even the soiled material, but it's suddenly so agonizingly mild, as if a mere flicker of a distant flame upon frostbitten skin; I crave its intimate, blazing contact with a visceral need.

"_S-Shego_... You... I want you to touch me." A molten flush explodes across her cheeks at that abrupt, breathless command, though I haven't the time to ponder what could be so extraordinary about such a benign plea as her questing hands finally ease beneath the sodden hem of my jacket, finding purchase with such glorious, coruscating electricity upon my bare flesh. "_Shego_... _Shego_..." My lips worship that sublime name again and again and again, emerging as a fragile and agonizingly brittle whimper while my body is convulsed with an impossible, shivering ecstasy.

"Kimberly... I..." Finally, her chest heaves; a violent, savage palpitation roars through her breast into mine. I can feel that exotic and indescribable heat flush anew throughout my body, but with a yammering, pining severity that I could never have conceived; it's more immediate, more powerful, than even those moments of exquisite anguish as it seemed as if death would overtake me, my thighs grinding together against that throbbing, tantalizing agony between them, my stomach boiling with some forbidden, scalding presence. This must be the caress of the divine.

"I... I feel so peculiar, _Shego_." Near to collapse as those wondrous, slim digits begin a languorous and absent-minded exploration along my spine, occasionally falling to my hips, easing shallowly beneath the hem of my trousers. Those momentary, seemingly thoughtless explorations stoke that savage furnace to infernal heights, robbing me of every trace of breath and forcing a low, inarticulate moan from my throat. "It's... I feel so close to something, and, and..." As our lips part again, I see an almost animal flame lunge into her dark gaze, her face drawn taut with a bewildering tension.

"Kimberly, you're..." A deep, wracking gasp; it seems as if she's upon the brink of absolute madness.

"Tell me. What- what is this? I feel like I'm losing my mind, and I- I need it so desperately."

"I will. But, after this... This meeting." It's that time-consuming to reveal it? My body, my mind, my very soul- they cry out with an impossible and insatiable longing for it, and she's deferring it ever further?

"No!" It's childish and absolutely ridiculous, but that's one secret that I won't be denied. I've felt this so often, but never with this wailing and overpowering intensity.

"It's... It's extraordinary, and I promise you... I promise you," Xi Go accentuates that with a breathless growl, "That I wouldn't deprive you, or me, of that unless you had only an hour to prepare."

"Damn it!" Both of us goggle at once at that oath, and I feel a baffling welling of utter mortification join that craving. "I... I'm sorry. That was dreadfully crude, wasn't it?" The reserved, upstanding Kimberly Dmitriovna has not evaporated entirely, it would seem.

"It was adorable. I don't think I've ever heard a single obscenity from you, Kimberly." For a brief instant, I've a glimpse of Xi Go as my wry governess again, discovering a particularly naughty secret of her student.

"Well, I..." My cheeks are awash in a maddening sheen of perspiration, blazing against the startlingly cool afternoon air. "It's so frustrating; it feels as if I'll explode." It truly does; that pressure that throbs within me, damp and molten, is excruciating. It gnaws at every nerve with a delicious cruelty, demanding that I resolve it by any means necessary, none of which I can even begin to envisage. Reason simply cannot exist in its roaring presence.

"I know. Please, believe me when I tell you that..." A harsh and gratifyingly vexed swallow. "When I tell you that the wait will be completely worthwhile." She's not lying, and that only further swells my craving for that consummation.

"Won't you tell me?" I'm begging with a supremely childish desperation.

"Trust me, Kimberly: discovering it will be more incredible than any explanation. It's... It's of the divine. Can you capture the Jade Emperor with mere mortal eyes?"

"I... All right." A glance at that infernal, rhythmically clicking abomination yields the truth of her claims; merely fifty-eight minutes now remain until I'll be confronted with whatever dreadfully banal visitor my father could conjure from amongst his colleagues.

"So, I'll usher you into the bath, and then aid you with dressing." Xi Go commands, my governess again.

"Won't- won't you bathe me?" She freezes at that, as if I've stricken her with those utterly innocuous words.

"Not... Not at this moment, or we'll never leave the bath." A vaguely cryptic reply, though I suppose that I can begin to approach the slightest shred of comprehension. Assuming that the sensation of being bathed by Xi Go even remotely resembles the ecstatic thrall of Maria's caress, I wouldn't wish to depart for the apocalypse.

"_Shego_?" A peculiar, surreal oddity has been gnawing at me since the instant that she materialized, though it's been so minor, so trivial and peripheral, that I've hardly even been aware of it amid the raging enormity of this emotional thrall.

"Hm?" Xi Go has, in the intervening instant, snapped with her characteristic, silent alacrity to the door, her slim fingers perched upon the knob.

"How did you enter, anyway? I- I didn't hear the door open." I'm astounded by the vaguely guilty smile that creases her black lips.

"I didn't bother with the door."

"Huh?"

"I just leapt onto the balcony." Xi Go explains with an expression that mother would doubtlessly identify as being of the most intolerable cheek, before the quick click of the mechanism is joined by the mild groan of the weighty portal easing open.

"You leapt onto the balcony?" A brief glance confirms that it soars probably five arshins above the courtyard. From what I recall, the sheer and sleek stone would hardly permit a mountaineer the slightest purchase.

"Come, Kimberly." A genial command, and I'm at her heels as if a duckling; that image conjures a mild, quirking smile.

"Still-"

"When you've learned, that will be a simple task." She speaks as if she'd consider vaulting Mount Everest in a single bound merely a casual exercise.

"Pardon?"

"When you learn to channel your strength, to control the flow of _qi_ and transform your breath into the alchemical elixirs of life and power, such a task will be attained without even the merest of thoughts."

"Even still..." She is a sorceress; perhaps I shouldn't be startled.

"Why didn't I open the door?"

"Yes."

"I was afraid that you'd reject me because of how foolishly I acted. I- I needed to see you directly, to embrace you, to apologize with every fiber of my being." Xi Go's voice dips to a solemn whisper.

"I forgive you." A beat. "Did I mention that?" I do, though I'm overcome by a sense of utter foolishness by the almost unbearable arrogance of it. Truly, it was my impetuous reaction that was responsible, even as it felt as if my soul would be torn asunder beneath the weight of the grief that lifted with her words as if merely a few grains of dust.

"I'm ecstatic to hear that." She seems to be, a wondrous and vibrant ecstasy displacing what had been utter sorrow.

"Do you forgive me?" I'm mortified by my own reaction, and my own feebleness in being unable to even speak with her; that I would simply flee in the throes of such a raging torrent of torment and frustration.

"For what?" Xi Go is legitimately bewildered, as if I've offered to apologize for the world's collective sins.

"For... For being so foolish." I finally, pitifully, conclude, following a struggle to quite capture in words that elude my groping mind that sense of utter stupidity and impatience.

"Please, do not. I was the fool." She cajoles, and I find myself near to neurotically protesting as she silences me with the briefest, mildest ghost of a kiss. It's nevertheless electrifying, my lips tingling sublimely beneath that delicate but firm pressure. It's as if she's channeled the most powerfully rapturous incantation imaginable. I'm unwilling to utter even the most momentary of words for fear of shattering that transcendental spell; my rather vacuous nod, I'm certain, will suffice.

"Kimberly?" I'm extraordinarily reticent to speak, but that sudden swelling of her wondrous, dulcet voice is an irresistible command.

"Yes?"

"Would you care for a bath today?" It's true; we stand before the elegantly inlaid door, my sightless eyes vapidly apprehending without recognition those graceful, scrolling and uniquely fluid patterns.

"O-oh, yes. I must have been on the moon." Or anywhere in Xi Go's arms, savoring that blissful and incomparable kiss. Pressing open the stout barrier with a wondrously chivalrous flourish, my romantic heroine ushers me into the brutally frigid embrace of those chilled tiles, my raw and aching soles soothed by their leeching caress.

"I hope that you'll return to me, Kimberly." A gentle giggle; I expect that she'll ever so patiently depart, perhaps guarding her maiden's door, but, as it clicks closed, I can perceive the delicate, rippling waves of warmth that flow from her sleek form.

"_S-Shego_?" I turn, a questioning but hardly disappointed cast forming upon my features, alight with a cascading flush despite the room's icy caress.

"Yes, Kimberly?" A perfectly, exaggeratedly casual smile, of the utmost innocence that would fail to persuade a blind man.

"I, uh... Do you wish to bathe me?"

"Is anything the matter? Aren't I but a humble servant, unoffended by my mistress' graceful nudity?" An almost mortifyingly theatrical flourish that raises a sudden and jarring awareness of how ridiculously naïve I must have seemed with Maria and Valentina, sisters or otherwise.

"I... I would love for you to bathe me." It's truly a desperate, yearning plea, a solemn and tortured smile settling upon her lips at the sheer longing manifest in my voice.

"As would I, Kimberly, but... I need to dress, myself." I suppose that's true. As wondrously elegant as her beauteous, untarnished garments may be, they're obviously not what my parents would expect of my suitably upstanding and 'civilized' governess.

"So..."

"Why am I here?" That rather vulpine grin returns in an instant.

"Yes?" My tone has dipped to a tortured whisper as I marvel at how ridiculously warm this bathroom has become, even in the void of the water.

"Does one require a rationale to admire the beautiful and statuesque?" That warmth becomes a volcanic heat, my knees virtually buckling with an ecstatic faintness.

"I... I suppose not." Agonizingly, anxiously, I find myself near to asking, 'But, why would you admire me?'

"Are you uncomfortable?" There's no judgment or expectation in that, but I'm nevertheless terrified of upsetting her; perhaps my fanciful mind has merely imposed my own tortured insecurity upon Xi Go.

"Well, I... I don't know. This is all so sudden, and so- so delirious. I felt as if I'd faint from your kiss alone, so-"

"Perhaps a bit of mystery should be left for the wedding night." Xi Go departs with a decidedly theatrical timing, begrudging me any opportunity to offer a suitably pathetic and bewildered reply at cryptic words that are pregnant with an almost indescribable promise.

"Oh, god..." A sudden compulsion to kneel in rapturous prayer and thanksgiving overtakes me. The quiet serenade of my soles upon the frigid tiles resounds quietly, devoured in an instant by the thundering, gurgling babel of the water fountaining forth in a steaming current from a delicate faucet as I, following a brief quandary, manipulate the gracefully-notched tap.

Without relish, overcome by a sense of almost manic urgency to be rid of this engagement and to, at long last, force Xi Go to fulfill her promise to be- whatever it may be-, I wade into the deftly swelling pool of boiling crystalline splendor. It's never represented such singular and utterly tangible relief, that immoderate heat, as if lunging forth from a volcanic spring, washing across flesh encrusted with a miserable and palpable veneer of sweat; it inspires such a horrid, tingling aggravation that its vanishment yields a furious, welling moan of complete bliss.

My aching, feeble, and raw muscles luxuriate amid the smoldering caress, lancing through that haze of grinding pain that's accumulated throughout the previous several days. I've the sense of a ceaseless series of blades shearing through every fiber of my being, even as some supernatural force mends them with the cruelest of implements, merely to be rent asunder again. It's an exquisite and all-consuming pain, and that sudden and simmering relief, alleviating the grinding knots and bulging grief beneath my bruised and battered flesh, renders it virtually impossible to concentrate upon so prosaic a task as cleansing myself.

Nevertheless, a groping exploration of the now clammy and tepid, dew-dappled tiles yields the heap of cloths and the stout hunk of fragrant soap that's begun to deform beneath the perennial, lashing erosion against the luxuriant fabric that I brush along my cheeks. My eyes closed, I massage the frothing lather into every inch of my skin, rising unselfconsciously from that glorious ocean, savoring the peculiar clash of the boiling water sloshing around my knees and the icy kiss of the misting air. I yearn for Xi Go's presence, to savor her caress, rather than the stroke of my own hands that yields not even the subtlest glimmer of that singular, sparking electricity, but I suppose that I can conjure the minutes shred of patience for the moment.

A silent scream issues from my lips as I plunge beneath the turbulent surface again, immersing myself wholly and allowing that liquid delight to weave through my hair, unraveling nascent knots that nevertheless ignite a momentous swell of raw torture as my fingers seek to stroke through that drift of crimson. I surface with a sputtering cough, though I'm nonetheless a bit awed by the alacrity with which I negotiate the water. It no longer tugs at me with such an intractable, wrenching intensity; even as my muscles cry out with the accumulated torture of these days of unrelenting training and conditioning, I've the sense of a liquid grace in every movement, well beyond the cumbersome and feeble struggle of what seems a gauzy past life that's begun to seep into distant memory.

It's a further startlement to discover that my palms instinctively seek out the slick rim of the pool, finding purchase despite the fine veneer of water, lifting me with a bewildering adroitness from its simmering embrace. Even with this grinding ache, I can manage motions of remarkable deftness with the utmost ease and comfort; a towel snaps from the floor, swaddling me in mere instants. It occurs to me that, while I can't even begin to approach Xi Go's improbable swiftness, I dwarf my previous, dawdling ponderousness; perhaps I'm merely a shambling tortoise by contrast with her supernatural grace and celerity, conveniently ignoring every one of those intermediary movements as she darts from one position to the next.

It's obvious that she's practiced that sleight-of-hand in divesting me of that costume, a tortured and self-conscious grimace splitting my bruised lips. However unladylike it may be to don such a soiled garment, it's decidedly less graceful and delicate to trek that nightmare distance, exposed to the increasingly sultry, perfumed spring air, to my bedchambers again.

With a desultory shiver against the chill, I ease from the bathroom, the dense terrycloth cinched firmly around my nude form; my eyes dart to and fro with a manic flicker, a silent prayer arising within my mind bearing a decidedly sacrilegious plea for a restoration of that transcendental sight. As it is, my feet carry me at an uncannily deft sprint, lunging and bounding with a desperation born of abject mortification toward my room. A mild warmth prickles at my forehead, but I'm hardly winded; it's an extraordinary epiphany to discover that there's not the subtlest suggestion of that familiar blazing ache within my lungs as my hand snaps upon the knob, forcing open that maddening barrier with a thundering impact.

It feels as if my shoulder splinters against that beauteous plane of intricate engravings, even as it finally parts; I discover myself within my chambers in the span of a blink, my back planted against it as I draw a sudden, panicked litany of breaths.

"Are you ready, Kimberly?" I feel torn between a fulminating fury and a gasp of utter rapture as my gaze falls upon Xi Go. She's attired precisely as I recall from our introduction, my sight beholding with a poetic, deliberate ecstasy every minute nuance of that utterly transcendent wardrobe. I don't even notice my towel drooping away, finally thumping with a muffled dampness upon the stout wooden floor, a breeze prickling upon my bare flesh.

A luminous smile adorns her lovely lips, peculiarly alight with a livid color that I realize is a subtle veneer of deep vermillion rouge; her sloe eyes meet mine for a brief instant as I behold her utterly majestic features, shadowed with that familiar sweep of her broad hat. I notice with particular intensity the sleek and luscious curves of her legs, clasped in the shimmering embrace of a pair of silk stockings, soaring upon wondrously elegant ebony heels; her wondrous, voluptuous contours accentuated by that singular dress, midnight striated with emerald. And the penetrating splendor of that jade pendant, glittering upon a silver chain that seems pathetically muted by contrast with its supernatural radiance.

"You're so beautiful, _Shego_." With a piteous whimper of belated awareness, my arms finally fold around my body, and I settle upon the mattress, my eyes still fixed hopelessly and unwaveringly upon her as she approaches.

"I couldn't possibly hope to compare with you, my alabaster Princess." A languid and tantalizing purr that reduces bone to a shivering gelatin and sets my skin ablaze.

"That's..." A pitiful smile completes my sentence, widening as I discover my gilded brush clasped in her elegantly tapered fingers.

"I've been fantasizing about this for some time, Kimberly. You don't mind, do you?"

"No." An immediate and vaguely desperate chirp of approval, continuing to anxiously shield my body from the appraising gaze that inspires a renewed wave of that molten tension. It grows further with the swell of her warmth behind me, settling upon my bedding, an aura of supernatural grace and beauty engulfing me with her approach. Her scent is even more powerful; I recognize it now as a mild hint of jasmine, refined and glorious, though I can perceive an innate and crisply unique perfume beneath that, seemingly apparent solely to senses that have become singularly attuned to her.

"You have as well." It's a statement of the obvious, but I nevertheless manage a timid and slightly tortured nod in reply. The inquisitive brush of her fingers across my nape, the pliant and flawless heat of her fingertips transitioning to the electrifying and unaccountably exhilarating stroke of elegantly manicured nails, wrenches a heated gasp from my lips that emboldens her to do so again, and again, before she finally begins to brush through my hair.

It's unique from Maria's and Ariadne's, but no less wondrous; it's more extraordinary, in fact, powerful and assertive, even in its supreme and unfaltering tenderness. Level, languid strokes coax rustling whispers from that curtain of silk and a series of ever more enraptured gasps from me; surrendering myself to it, I barely register anything but that constant, regular litany of movements, hypnotizing me. My hypersensitive flesh perceives even the minutest lash of my own damp locks against my skin, and I'm certain that I'll explode at the teasing glide of her fingertips across my back and shoulders.

"Kimberly." My only response is a keening wail at the rustling, damp caress of her breath across the shell of my ear, her voice seeming to fill the whole of my existence with its electrifying splendor.

"Y-yes?"

"Would you like to dress now?" I wouldn't. Some visceral, gnawing instinct screams at me to bare myself wholly to her, to offer myself to her as if a bride upon her wedding night; to beg and plead for her to touch me, guided by a deeper wisdom than I can muster.

"I... I suppose that I should." Why? A snapping, internal welling of fury rages against the sheer stupidity of this. I've found the one that I love, sinful or not; defiant or not, why should this dim English boy be of even the remotest consequence to me?

"The sooner that you dress, the sooner I'll introduce you to a joy beyond joys." An irresistible promise. "A magic beyond description that wells from the very deepest reaches of the body and soul."

"All right." It's remarkable how swiftly I agree to that, rising to my feet, and then settling again upon the mattress. It occurs to me that I haven't the slightest inkling of what I'm to wear; my parents probably wouldn't approve of the _zanze_. "What am I to wear?"

"I've seen truly beautiful gowns in your trunks, Kimberly." She's explored my room?

"Oh?"

"Well... I can't deny that, as I waited for you to awaken, I became a bit curious about those chests." I can't believe that I confront a vaguely abashed smile from Xi Go.

"You watched over me as I slept?"

"Of course, Kimberly." That instills me with a joy beyond description; the notion of a guardian angel, a sorceress of supreme and transcendental power and beauty, overseeing me as I rested. "So, do you have any preference?"

"The... The _zanze_." I'm astounded that I can actually conjure a remotely serviceable pronunciation, though it renders it all the more maddening that I'm unable to capture the pure, sublime tones of her true name.

"What of something that wouldn't cause your parents to despise your governess as a wretched and corrupting influence?" A slightly amused chuckle.

"I know, I know." I virtually manage to ignore my own nakedness as I rise again, padding to a hopelessly drab, leather-banded steamer trunk that one of the porters carelessly, at my instruction, heaved against a dark and shadow-wreathed corner of the chamber. It's obvious that it's been opened, actually; the pitted monogram greets me as my eyes adjust with improbable ease to the virtually lightless void, though it had been set against the rugged wood underfoot originally.

"I hoped that you'd notice." Another test? My eyes goggle at the facility with which I snap open once maddeningly intractable clasps, as if a liquid strength has begun to circulate throughout every reach of my body. Easing open the lid, I immediately discover my abhorred Parisian wardrobe; Xi Go is beside me in a moment, indicating a very particular garment with what I could almost consider a timid stroke of her fingertip against the heap of fabric.

"That?"

"Well... Yes, Kimberly. It's lovely; I envy that you've such a gorgeous wardrobe." It's actually gratifying that she seems so awkward, almost childishly embarrassed at that admission when I ease a voluminous gown from the mass, a creamy ivory, gently interwoven with subtle streaks of gilded brocade.

"This?"

"I'm certain that it will be perfectly beautiful." It is, actually, though I haven't worn it for ages. She seems nearly to plead for me to indulge her, and I do, easing into a now thoroughly alien set of undergarments before settling upon the bed again, diligently unfurling a rather brittle, bone white stocking along my leg; it seems virtually perfunctory, given the milky pallor of my skin. Glancing up for a moment, I notice her attention riveted to me, her slender hands tensing and relaxing with an almost ferocious anxiety.

"_Shego_?"

"I... You're just so captivatingly beautiful." A wistful smile as she eases nearer to me, kneeling with a quiet rustle of silk before me. "May I?"

"Yes." That onerous irritation becomes another incomparable joy with the blissful, all-enveloping warmth of her hands, approaching me with an extraordinary reverence. The heat is exquisite, pulsating and rippling through the sheer and fragile fabric, lingering upon me in what I realize is hardly anything so banal and utilitarian as my own disinterested motions. It's virtually a massage in itself, brushing along my feet with a tingling, tantalizing grace that raises a burning flush upon my cheeks with its sheer, avid sensuality; finally unfurling that lustrous fabric along my legs, gliding further and further, tearing a whimper from my throat with the caress of her palms across my calves, reaching toward that throbbing, tortured dampness.

A strangled scream erupts from my lips at the instant her fingertips graze along the shatteringly hypersensitive tenderness of my inner thighs, though she doesn't halt; it's with a monstrous, teasing cruelty that she simply persists with fastening the frail fabric to my garters, offering me a spine-melting smile, her eyes dark and entrancingly lidded, as she eases away.

"_Shego_..."

"I love every part of you, Kimberly." A delicate and private whisper from between my meekly parted legs, the pale pink majesty of her tongue briefly darting across her lips in a gesture that inflames that desperate, directionless craving all the further.

"I... I can't believe that I'll need to act normally with this boy, with my parents." My legs are perennially upon the cusp of failing me as Xi Go aids me to my feet, assisting me with the gown that now seems impossibly leaden by contrast with the familiar, easy levity of that exotic costume, or the _zanze_.

"You can be patient, can't you?" There's an unstated implication that, if she can, I should be. Then again, perhaps she's secretly delighting in tormenting me.

"I suppose so." Xi Go appears doubly ecstatic as I ease into a pair of pale heels, pirouetting with a pathetic awkwardness that's beyond anything that I can recall, particularly with my most recent agility. She nevertheless rewards me with a rapturous smile, providing one final, infuriatingly brief kiss as inspiration as she ushers me toward the door again.

The low, staccato clatter of my shoes upon the sturdy hardwood is now a surreal and alien ambiance, even as I delight in the wondrously poetic and unparalleled grace of her deft and sweeping movements. Somehow, she manages to remain silent amid my cumbersome, elephantine tramping, though I simply devote my energies wholly to savoring her. My eyes are lured by a bewitching magnetism to the abundant, sensual flare of her hips, the delicate and entrancing sway and sweep of her utterly statuesque curves. She seems to have been carved by a sculptor of transcendental inspiration, touched by the truly celestial; a reflection of the divine in living, pliant marble, easing forth with a languorous grace that no mere mortal could aspire to emulate.

My dread at this engagement is gradually waning with the hypnotic, pendulous sway of her body, even as we ease along the corridor to the central building; my attention remains fixed upon magnificence in ebony and emerald, rather than a bleached skeleton livid with fringes of luminous, regal vermillion. Nevertheless, as we return to that nexus, a shadow-dappled murk supplanting the luminous, natural splendor of the afternoon sun's caress, an indefinable and shivering anxiety ripples through me; a serpentine, writhing entity of raw agony, as if the merest of contact with this interloper will destroy the joy that I've so recently discovered.

Crimson flickers and dances with an almost mischievous, liquid grace across the reception hall, darkly illuminating a figure of towering, stately immensity that I barely recognize for the weeks of our separation. At once, with hazy and surreal awareness, my past life converges with the present; it's father, though his features are improbable pale amid the writhing caress of the torchlight.

"Papa." As fervently as I struggle, guided by some vestigial instinct, I'm unable to force that soaring exuberance into my voice with that acknowledgment; he doesn't seem to notice, in any event, his attention characteristically fixed upon Xi Go. Rather than confusion, however, that conjures a roaring flare of unaccountable anger.

"You've finally come, Kimberly. Xi Go." He lingers upon her name, even as I approach him to be claimed by his embrace. It finally occurs to me as I feel that massive, bear-like warmth enfold me; my thoughts have not even once drifted toward that, even as I had pined and yearned for it for a year, longing for his sheltering presence again.

"Yes, papa." I affirm, astounded by how... How completely, utterly chilled I am by that which once boiled with the sun's heat.

"I hope that you'll like this young man; he's a business partner's boy, and a perfectly charming gentleman. An Englishman, but he speaks perfect French; I'm certain that you'll get along splendidly." Father's voice is oddly subdued; distant and almost fragile, it's as if he's barely within this plane of existence.

"Where is mother?" I finally ask, following an aching span of silence.

"Seeing to his mother and father; I'll be joining them shortly." Not even an introduction? I suppose that's to be expected; and it's a relief that further dreadful, meandering encounters with his boorish colleagues can be avoided.

That thought invokes a snapping wave of epiphany. Had my mind supplied such a sardonic and caustic thought, even to myself?

"Very well, father. I..."

"Will Xi Go be joining you?" Such an extraordinary relief that father is the one to suggest that. "You will need a chaperone, the boy's maid notwithstanding." I'm upon the cusp of scoffing inwardly at the notion of a young man of my age requiring a maid, until it occurs to me that I had virtually clung to Maria's apron until several days ago.

"Of course, sir." Her unwaveringly polite, level tone ruptures the brief silence, as if she's genuinely been pondering whether she desires such a terrible, onerous task. "I would be delighted to chaperone your daughter. I am, after all, her governess." And my lover, my suddenly mischievous mind supplies with an utterly outlandish giddiness.

"Excellent. Excellent." An exuberant clap of his massive palms, in a manner that seems a sudden resurrection of his characteristic spirit. "Well, they'll be in the European room; I'm sure that you can see to it."

"Of course, sir." A graceful inclination of her slim and wondrous form in a suitably deferential bow. Father turns without a further word, vanishing into the adjoining corridor amid a thundering of his weighty shoes through the gloom. Despite myself, I can't overcome a sense of acute and overpowering grief at the... It can only be indifference. The terrible and callous indifference that he displays toward me, as if I've somehow ceased to be of any meaning for him; that I'm no longer his bear cub.

The serene majesty that lunges forth within me at Xi Go's hand upon my shoulder stifles the sudden and piteous sob that begins to form in my chest, and I turn to her with an inquiring gaze.

"The European room?" It seems perfectly ludicrous amidst this oriental splendor to bother with such an idiotic affectation that I can now only consider horrendously foreign.

"The former owner constructed several chambers in the European fashion. It has become quite popular, even as it clashes so dreadfully with the Chinese designs." Xi Go seems to hold my opinion, as well, escorting me toward our destination through the corridor into which father vanished. He's long since disappeared into some other distant reach of the compound as we drift with an uneasy trepidation along an unfamiliar path that lies along the opposite half of the courtyard.

It seems as if it should be another planet for its alien oddity; everything is seemingly inverted, though my attention remains riveted to Xi Go. So much so, in fact, that I barely even notice when she halts at a threshold carved as seemingly an afterthought into the stark stone; it ruptures the elegantly engraved, writhing pattern of dragon's scales, and I earnestly wonder what would impel anyone to so cruelly shatter anything of such beauty for such a ludicrous trend; that it may be exotic to them as an occidental curiosity is no rationale.

Even the door is of a featureless oak, graven with a single _fleur de lis _at its center that seems impossibly sorrowful in its feeble isolation; a malevolent affliction upon that beauteous flower, denied the presence of its companions despite the voluminous, livid magnificence of the garden mere paces from it. Xi Go, with all due European courtesy, delivers a series of polite, firm, level raps upon the finely varnished wood, before easing it open with a graceful flourish; lingering traces of habit when confronted with that peculiar aesthetic guide me before her into a chamber that at once is of a stultifying, almost nightmare familiarity.

Rather than the broad, expansive vistas of the Chinese chambers, exposed to the glorious and sensual caress of the elements, enveloped in the mingling perfumed majesties of the breezes fluttering from the garden, it is of a dreadful isolation; electric chandeliers blaze from the ceiling, garishly draped with glittering constellations of diamonds, swaying upon an invisible current that seeps from without as the door remains ajar. It halts at once with its closure, a quiet click of the latch seemingly the leaden thunder of a mausoleum seal.

The room is adorned in shades of ivory and sepia; pallid carpeting transitioning to wallpaper that savagely mocks the fundamental magnificence of the wood's vain perfection. Lamps glimmer upon rugged tables set beside cream-upholstered sofas and grotesquely bloated, overstuffed leather chairs of ghoulish, sanguine burgundy.

My gaze immediately falls upon what I've little doubt is the young man's maid, a supremely traditional ensemble of ebony and ivory accenting the remarkably dusky and exotic cast of her skin; a peculiar contrast again with her eyes, harsh and glinting chips of penetrating azure. Her full and rather cruel lips quirk into a supremely insincere smile as she rises, unfolding with a lyrical grace to a height above my own; slender legs are enveloped within black stockings beneath the knee-length hem of her dress, a bleached apron swelling with a remarkable bust. Chestnut locks gently ghost across her slender shoulders, and she brushes away a few errant filaments with a careless sweep of her hand.

"Good afternoon." She speaks English, albeit tinged with a peculiar and exotic, mellifluous affectation. It's extraordinary how stern and assertive she seems, despite her youth; she seems impatient with our mere presence.

"I- Uh... Good afternoon." The young man's voice startles me; it occurs to me that I hadn't even noticed him as the elegant, cultured and clipped tones that I've come to associate with English pomp and aristocracy drift into my senses. He's rather the antithesis of his maid; slight, pale and almost feminine skin mottled with a cluster of freckles that offset his remarkably full and crimson lips. His eyes are dark, expressive russet, a rather unruly mop of blonde locks bristling around his brow. A refined black suit suggests an exceptionally modest physique beneath it. "Er, um... _Bonjour_." His French is flawless, albeit of the sort that I identify with the most achingly pompous Parisians.

"_Bonjour_." I greet him, finally.


	7. Love

"_Bonjour_." That trickles as an uneasy seepage of breath, barely audible, from my lips. "Uh, _Bonjour_." I repeat, conjuring a minute shred of confidence in the presence of my lover and his unnerving maid. I'd visualized an infinitely more severe, singularly British gentleman; of archetypal, arch, upstanding intensity, upper lip so stiff as to permit hardly a smile. The young man before me, however, offers me a supremely awkward quirking of his startlingly full and feminine lips, a peculiar pink, a shade paler than the flush that creeps as an inexorable, molten tide across his pallid cheeks.

I haven't spoken French for what seems a virtual eternity, and my mind begins to reel, groping desperately for a suddenly, maddeningly elusive lexicon that threatens to flee completely from my brain's tenuous grasp. Words, however, progressively align themselves; French trickling into rigid and artless columns beside the more natural and fluid palpitations of the German and Russian that coruscate through my mind. Courtesy of Xi Go, I've come to adore German even more so than my native language; I don't believe I've even thought in it, aside from a brief encounter with Vasilevich.

"I, um... My... My name is..." Upon a certain, wickedly cruel and awful level, it's a relief that our visitor is more tortured than I am as he struggles to even dredge his name from with whatever jumble of thoughts he's struggling. A brief, tortured glance at his maid seems to restore a subtle shred of focus, and he returns his gaze to me, expansive auburn eyes alight with a truly palpable anxiety. "My name is Rupert." A beat. "Um, Rupert Goldman." A momentary, brittle broadening of his smile. "It's, um, it's a pleasure to meet you."

"My name is Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym." I offer with all due, regal propriety, lowering myself in a brief and perfunctory curtsy that remains as an inescapable and visceral instinct from a past courtly existence. Thoughtlessly, I extend my gloved hand; his response is merely to peer at it with a certain vacuous perplexity, slim fingers sheathed in ivory silk, until it seems to occur to Rupert that I've offered it to him. He finally claims my palm, lowering his lips with what I could only consider a vague discomfort to the back of my hand; I suppress the shudder of distaste that threatens to unfurl through my body, stifling it with a harsh swallow, as if grudgingly accepting some pernicious and alien medicine.

A flicker of my eyes to Xi Go yields nothing but her characteristically neutral smile, though her glorious sloe gaze appears to alight for a brief instant with what I'm rapturously certain is a flare of aggravation at the thoroughly arcane gesture.

"It's- it's wonderful to meet you, Miss Vozmozhnym." Rupert's pronunciation is absolutely execrable, an awkward and jumbled stream of syllables that yield merely the most tenuous approximation of my surname.

"Call me Kimberly, please." I implore, for my sake more so than any deepening of a sense of illusory intimacy. I've no intention of humoring him, or my parents, more so than custom and politesse dictate; even now, my spirit rages with the utter indignity of this, of being forced to feign this abhorrent congeniality toward a boy that inspires not even the minutest flicker of interest, even as my lover- the wondrous, singular, transcendentally beautiful woman that I love with a passion that roils and howls as an irrepressible inferno in my breast- stands within reach.

At once, I'm so powerfully, abjectly, cringingly aware of everything that has eluded me, that I've been forced to stifle for the sake of this sheltered and naïve existence; the full, gleaming, sensuous constellation of emotions blanketed beneath a drab mist of willful ignorance and restraint. Cruelly, I despise this boy; every shred of shivering frustration, of yearning and tortured evenings, pining for an embrace and love that my very existence denied me, seems manifest in this effigy of patrician pretenses.

"Very well, um... Kimberly." That shy, whispered reply, convulsed with an awkward quiver of his cracking voice, places that accumulated hatred in abeyance. It isn't his fault that true life was denied me; it's delusion to envisage a life resembling anything that I've experienced for even this achingly brief span with Xi Go in Russia or France. "It's wonderful to meet you." He repeats, enormous, liquid eyes continuing to dart periodically to his maid.

"Yes." I affirm, utterly unconvincingly, awaiting the moment at which he'll finally release my hand.

A brief cough from his maid, a harsh and exaggerated bark that shears through the pregnant and stifling silence that's settled across us, seems to rupture his disoriented haze; his fingers fall from my palm, finally liberating me to be seated with a noncommittal gesture for him to join me upon the sofa opposite. Following weeks of the elegant, understated comfort of Chinese furniture, this exaggeratedly plush, opulent cushioning is insufferable; I discover myself perennially shifting, struggling to wrench myself from the sagging pit that's begun to form beneath me within the bulging upholstery, earnestly pondering if some void has formed in the fabric of reality. It's also apparently for what reason Xi Go, my eternally dutiful and demure governess, remains standing; periodic, yearning glances confirm that she's beholding my present ordeal with a not inconsiderable measure of mirth, offering me a series of grins that could only be deemed cheeky.

"So, um... Are you enjoying your time in Shanghai?" Rupert's delicate and slightly reedy tenor, rife with the nasal excesses of Parisian French, trickles through the thrall of aching silence. It's wholly unnatural, and startlingly disorienting, to be deprived of the perpetual susurration of the garden, livid and writhing with life at every instant. This is a tomb, sealing me away from that transcendental serenade that redeems even the idlest and most tiresome moments.

"I am." An immediate and wholly sincere answer, striving to emulate Xi Go's characteristically sincere crypticness. I've absolutely loved Shanghai, or what I've experienced of it; but Shanghai itself, as city, is certainly not an aspect of that.

"That's good." A tentative nod of his head, blonde locks rustling across his brow. "That's good."

"Yes." A further eternity of tortured silence. I notice that Rupert's attention seems more firmly fixed upon his maid than me; it would be positively mortifying if it weren't such a relief. She looms with a positively massive presence beside him, eternally seeming to survey us together, as if weighing and judging even the most benign flicker of motion; the most careless or trivial brush of my fingertips against my cheek, every idle stroke through my hair.

She is beautiful, however thoroughly unusual that striking allure is. I'm particularly astounded by the sheer focus manifest in her genuinely ferocious azure gaze; those twin chips of sapphire periodically alighting with what I'm quite certain is legitimate anger if ever my sight lingers upon him, however disinterestedly, for greater than a few moments.

"Would anyone care for tea?" Xi Go interjects, perhaps simply for anything to say amid this absolutely nightmarish stillness. Her French startles me; it seems curiously archaic, endowed with a melodious and elegant twinge of rusticity that absolutely electrifies me. It's as if every language spoken is approached with a poet's grace, the content and form of the words less meaningful than the sheer, mellifluous delight of those musical syllables.

"That- that would be lovely." Rupert agrees at once, confronting a rather jarringly contemptuous roll of his maid's most unique eyes as he turns to her with an expression that seems more exhorting than commanding. "Would you mind," he speaks in English, which I can haltingly discern, "Ja-" a sudden and jarring halt, before he continues. "That is, would you mind, Miss LaRoche?"

"No, sir." She replies with merely the most perfunctory obeisance, as if the concept of obedience to her charge is as foreign as regular flights to the moon. Her speech is extraordinarily unique; it's tinged with a completely unfamiliar affection that's gentle, languorous, and musical, even as her words seem so startlingly abrupt. "I will see to it right away." If anything, she appears reticent to depart, a savage gaze briefly lashing at Xi Go with an obvious implication of that she should be so civil as to collect the tea herself, or to fetch a servant. Rupert appears all the more uneasy as the door clatters closed behind her, the low click of her heels swallowed by the cruel resurgence of silence.

"Your maid is very lovely." I find myself observing with an almost painful vacuity.

"Yes, she is." He finally replies, what I could only deem a tone of the utmost wistfulness permeating his suddenly lively and focused voice. "Yes."

"And most unusual." Anything to fill this aching void.

"Oh?" If he's eager to discuss his maid, then I suppose that we should. "In what regard?"

"Her name is LaRoche, isn't it?"

"Yes." An inquisitive quirk of his eyebrow, as if he cannot quite perceive my intent.

"Well... It's a most unusual name, I suppose, for someone so dark. Her eyes are also the most striking blue." A sense of profound foolishness settles over me, suddenly terrified that he'll think me one of those pernicious, imperial sorts that occupy themselves with debating the cranial capacity of the races, and the influence of color on civilization.

"I- I suppose that's true." His reply suggests that I probably seem to be.

"Well, that is... I was merely curious. She's very beautiful." I suppose that I can appreciate for what reason his eyes linger upon her, with hardly the scarcest regard for me.

"Yes." Another eager nod, as if this is his favored subject. "T-that is, she is very beautiful, I know. I... I have been blessed to have such a kind maid. We- we were, uh, somewhat raised together."

"Oh?"

"Yes." I've begun to notice that nodding seems to be his most expressive form of communication, conveying such depth of conviction with that regular, harsh bob.

"That's very interesting."

"P-pardon?"

"My..." As desperately as I seek to smother it beneath a thoroughly manufactured, blasé facade, a sudden, black welling of grief grips my heart. "My maid, Maria, and her sister, Valentina, were like sisters to me. I... I love them very much."

"That's wonderful." I'm taken aback by how emphatically he announces that, smile widening to disarmingly vast, glimmering proportions for a moment. It occurs to me that he is genuinely handsome; slightly delicate and feminine, but alighting with an almost infectious charisma when he beams so radiantly.

"It is." I deign not to mention that Maria despises me, and that I haven't seen Valentina for weeks.

"Jacqueline... That- that is, Miss LaRoche," another trickling of crimson into his pallid cheeks, "Is very special. She's been a, a wonderful friend to me. I cannot remember a single day without her." It seems to occur to him that his maid is perhaps not the sole viable topic of conversation. "But, uh, that's- that's probably rather trivial to you. What, erm, what have you done while in Shanghai?"

"I've been here, mainly." Which, I suspect, renders me hopelessly and pathetically unworldly. I'm curiously torn; I don't desire the slightest shred of his attention, and yet abhor the notion of being mistaken for some ignorant patrician girl whose education extends merely to courtly intrigue or the most frivolous gossip. "With... With _Shego_ as my, uh, governess." My lover; my beloved; that which instills my life with meaning. It's maddening, raw torture to refer to her in such prosaic and disingenuous terms, as if she's merely a common servant.

"_Shego_? That's a most extraordinary name." His dark eyes briefly dart to Xi Go, who favors him with a perfectly congenial smile. My own attention is riveted to her, rapt and longing. Every instant that my gaze falls upon her inflames me, the caress of an exquisite inferno upon flesh numb in her absence. With a certain embarrassment, I return to our guest, nibbling at my lip with an agonizing struggle to suppress that desperate, seething craving for her touch, for her lingering and transcendental kisses. This is more excruciating than I could possibly have believed.

"It's... I can't pronounce it correctly." I mutter distantly, feeling that molten, moist heat stir between my thighs; it's an unbearable strain to remain still, to feign total normality as I know my cheeks seethe with a volcanic crimson.

"My name is Xi Go." My lover... My lover!... Interjects, caressing her sublime and incomparable name with those wondrous, voluptuous raven curves. "But, I am more fond of Kimberly's pronunciation; I understand that it is the Russian." She lies, which is nevertheless absolutely glorious.

"Oh." Rupert seems vaguely confused, but resigned to remain unenlightened. "You speak French so well, I'd nearly forgotten that you are Russian. And with a lovely English name."

"My mother is English." I offer as explanation; I deign not to mention that she may very well be mad.

"D-do you miss Russia?" Do you miss your home, do you not miss everything dear and familiar to you? I do not ask with a sudden and venomous welling of fury. He pales a bit, rather an accomplishment in itself, at the palpable rage that I can feel vaulting into my eyes.

"I- I do. Greatly. But," I soothe myself with another glimpse of Xi Go, "Shanghai is wonderful. More so than I could ever have believed."

"I've never seen Russia." It's as if he's confessing the most dreadful and pernicious crime.

"It's..." Perhaps it truly no longer is my home. That's a truly jarring epiphany, the sense that those tethers that bound me to Saint Petersburg, to our home and the glorious, predictable winter chill and spring thaw and Ariadne's embrace at Smolniy are being severed with every embrace, every captivating crush of Xi Go's lips upon mine. "It is magnificent."

"Where did you live?"

"Saint Petersburg."

"Oh? The capitol?"

"Yes." I nod, suddenly energized. It's as if I'm addressing every answer to Xi Go, to elucidate a past that we've never discussed.

"I've- I've seen pictures in winter. I'm amazed that there could be so much snow."

"Have you? I must amid that being without the snow, or at least in such profusion, has been jarring." He seems nearly taken aback by my suddenly animated speech, though I hardly notice. "It seems unnatural for everything not to be blanketed with an ocean of that ivory brilliance, for the rivers not to be traversed by sledges, for the jangle of sleighs and their conductors' shouts not to be the constant ambiance."

"That sounds extraordinary. Magical."

"But, uh... What about yourself?" My mother's perennial instructions of ladyhood well into my mind: to flatter a man's ego, even if it's one of no interest. And that applies, I've realized, to every man.

"We... We, well, my family, lived in Germany, and then London." He appears to be consumed by a similar longing.

"Germany?"

"Well, I cannot remember that particularly well. It- it was so long ago. My eighteenth birthday was just a few days ago, and I must have been four or five when we moved away."

"Do you speak German?"

"Yes, of course." It's somehow a tremendous relief, and I find myself babbling with a sense of total liberation.

"That's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I- I find French to be the most dreadful tongue." His eyes widen with a sense of utter bafflement at that stream of German. "I wish that you had told me before that you spoke German."

"Well, I... It's not the most popular language nowadays, what with the Great War." A slightly abashed smile. "My parents changed the spelling of our surname. Although, I suspect that it was for..." A wrinkling of his eyebrows. "Well, never mind. I didn't expect that a Russian noblewoman would speak German."

"Then there is much that you haven't learned about Russian noblewomen." I can actually laugh, even at such a thoroughly ludicrous notion. "But, I assure you, we are not royalty."

"Oh." Another timid smile. "I had the sense that you were."

"For what reason?"

"I- it was just a sense, I suppose. You're of a very... Er..." A brief, desperate instant, in which it appears as if he's groping for the most politic means of resolving that sentence. "You're very regal." I perhaps would not wish to know of what word he'd selected originally.

"Perhaps." A slightly uneasy smile creases my lips. "I... I find it very uncomfortable to be."

"Oh, thank god." Even Xi Go seems astounded by the sheer enormity of the relief rising within his voice; it seems as if he deflates at once, upright British pomp expelled with a quiet but ferocious sigh that seems reminiscent of a silent hurricane. "Thank god."

"Pardon?"

"I've- I've been very worried about this meeting since my parents told me of you. Given your father's standing, I... I had suspected that there would be a great emphasis upon formality and ritual; which is doubly embarrassing with the likely nonsense that mother and father filled my head with about Russians." If I weren't eminently familiar with precisely that nonsense, I would be offended; as it is, I manage a chuckle.

"I don't know if all of it is nonsense, but I'm beginning to find it very liberating to be away from the courtly life." Another vague giggle, which he echoes a bit more uneasily.

"That... That is quite a relief." That familiar, emphatic nod. "Kimberly, this is terribly, terribly awkward for me." A confession of the self-evident, though I deign not to mention that awkward does not quite begin to approach how thoroughly agonizing the notion of entertaining poor Rupert has been.

"Yes." I content myself with that single, noncommittal word, and it occurs to me precisely how intensely influential Xi Go has actually been; it could be a simple confirmation of his own sentiments, or merely an acceptance of the circumstances; it could be nothing whatsoever beyond a vague undulation of air from my battered lungs and bruised lips.

"I... I'm perfectly dreadful and utterly hopeless at these sorts of things. I barely know how to carry myself with my own peers, and we've just met, so... I- I hope that you'll forgive how, how... Well, how perfectly dreadful I am." As his momentous, limpid eyes widen with an aching trepidation at the resurrected silence, welling forth as if some monstrous revenant, my own narrow minutely but doubtlessly perceptibly at the sense that he wishes for whatever farce of a courtship ritual this is to persist. Or expects that it will, in any event.

"Mister Goldman-"

"Rupert, please." A patently desperate gasp of a plea.

"Rupert, I..." What am I to ask? I can't even begin to conceive of being so cruel as to reject him so forthrightly, particularly with prospect of confronting my parents' lengthy interrogation about my sudden reticence, never mind uncharacteristic assertiveness. Nonetheless, I can't abide the notion of simply humoring him in this delusion; that would be equally as bestial, and for both of us.

"Yes, Kimberly?"

"Miss Kimberly," Xi Go's sudden rupture of that suffocating, tortured quiet is a jarring but utterly blissful relief, "Is not accustomed to these sorts of engagements. I..." An unerringly theatrical, pensive pause, "I fear that there may be some miscommunication."

"Miscommunication?" Whether Rupert is disappointed or mortified, it's challenging to discern; his milky cheeks nevertheless swell with a familiar flush, his gaze immediately tumbling from its tenuous focus upon my own.

"Yes, Mister Goldman." Xi Go's pronunciation lingers upon the 'n', supplying another in a manner that would doubtlessly render a great many of my parents' sensibilities distinctly uncomfortable. As it is, it inspires a remarkable sight of our guest seeming to shuffle in place upon his awkward perch at the most precipitous fringe of the ivory sofa cushion.

"I- I'm afraid that I don't quite understand." My heart seizes with an abrupt and cringing welter of grief for him. It's humiliating; I can only envisage how tormented I would be by such a revelation.

"Ah. I see." Xi Go, similarly, seems a bit taken aback. Rupert isn't daft; he's a year beyond my age, and likely merely several months. This is agony for me, so I can only begin to visualize how torturous it is for him. Whatever his desires or intentions, whatever he may think of the hopelessly plain girl that's been offered to him in the most cynical and repulsive manner imaginable, to hear that I can't even begin to entertain the prospect of ever, in any foreseeable future, conjuring the remotest shred of affection for him would be as crushing as it would be for me to hear.

A brief, thundering rap at the door interrupts Xi Go as she draws a prolonged and contemplative breath, obviously struggling with the burden that she's unwittingly foisted upon herself.

"Y-yes? Please, enter." That swell of the stagnant air, vaguely cloying with a lingering trace of perfume and the mild spice of Rupert's cologne, is translated into words suddenly rife with an almost indescribable relief.

"_I can't open the door_." It's his maid's voice, muffled and distorted, though no less intriguing, as it resonates through the portal. I've merely the most nebulous inkling of what's been said, though I'm a bit startled to discover Rupert vaulting to his feet, virtually tearing open the door and graciously claiming a substantial silver tray of distinctly European confectionery. They exchange a smile that I suddenly, somewhat jarringly, recognize as being hardly familial; an uncannily shy, sidelong gaze from Miss LaRoche, her deep complexion darkening minutely as his flares a livid crimson.

"Thank you, sir." Her intonation deepens, as if those words are intended to be heard by Rupert alone, which perhaps they are; she behaves as if we're invisible. It's a peculiar and slightly off-putting experience, but oddly familiar. Regardless of any sense of propriety, her hand lingers upon his wrist as he accepts the weighty burden beneath which his rather fragile arms sag, remarkably fine fingers drawn in gentle, languid strokes across his exposed skin. With virtually superhuman sensitivity, I'm certain that I perceive a mild, shivering tremor course through him at that.

"We, uh... Well, we have high tea." A spectacular revival of his charming and slightly buffoonish jubilance as he wheels about, a suggestion of an ominous sloshing issuing forth from a familiar, gorgeously ornate samovar that I've not confronted for what feels an eternity. The tray itself is of stunningly wrought sterling, knotted strands of precious metal, interwoven with threads of platinum and gold, strung along the fringes of a fine, squared platter of pure, lustrous silver; it glimmers with a transcendental sheen, honed with obsessive energy by the servants.

Atop it, however, is a constellation of items that glimmer with a truly supernatural majesty. Rather than a conventional English sterling set, which is obviously what he expects, a stout Tula samovar rests, encircled by a prodigious phalanx of divine vessels that family tradition holds stem from the era of Ykaterina. The cups themselves are is if a host of grails, deep and narrow goblets of stunningly polished gold, luminous veneers adorned with an array of exotic Asiatic figures in delicate relief; the exteriors are enameled with an absolutely stunning assortment of fragile floral patterns, fragile sweeps of verdant emerald intertwining with periwinkle. The samovar is decorated similarly, a stout drum inlaid with deep, dusky gold and swirling blossoms in achingly detailed enamel; the niggling suggestion of a slightly noxious, smoldering clutch of embers within the chimney beneath curls into the chamber, a singularly nostalgic shard of Saint Petersburg.

"That's absolutely beautiful." Xi Go approaches, dispensing with the obligatory scholarly distance of her role as my governess. Her dark eyes apprehend every minute nuance of the design, lingering with extraordinarily patient diligence upon each graceful sweep of color.

"It is. It's a family heirloom." I intone, my gaze beholding a now unfamiliar clutch of saccharine delights; intricate pastries in stark, contrasting monochromes, midnight chocolate and purest white sugar.

"That's most remarkable." Even Rupert seems astounded, setting the tray with a heightened reverence upon the stout wooden coffee table separating the sofas. "I'm accustomed to a plain sterling tea service." A slightly pensive murmur. "There doesn't seem to be a spout." He pauses for a further instant. "Or a pot."

"It's a spigot." The sense of being an ambassador of a long-bygone Russia overtakes me, and I offer a likely unnecessarily intricate explanation of the gilded tap uncoiling from the drum; that it merely decants boiling water to dilute the _zavarka_.

"_Zavarka_?" I gather that Rupert has never been introduced to any element of the Russian tradition.

"Oh. It's... Well, it's an incredibly potent brew." I indicate a slim extrusion at the peak, from which a slender, upturned spout juts. "I don't believe that you'd enjoy it alone; only Vasilevich ever does, and that's when he's recovering from an evening of indiscretions." My mother's favored term.

"It's that terrible?"

"That potent." I explain with a quiet giggle. "It's concentrated tea, which any good family allows to steep for the entire day."

"Oh."

"Shouldn't Mister Goldman demonstrate his manhood by partaking of the _zavarka_, Kimberly?" It's a challenge greater than my wherewithal to stifle a bellowing outburst of laughter, a mild and decidedly unladylike snort punctuating it at the instant that I'm certain that I'll control myself.

"Well, uh... _Shego_, I don't think that anyone should." I had once, at Vasilevich's mischievous urging, and tasted solely that bitter tar upon my tongue for a week.

"I think that I'll have mine with an abundance of water, actually." Rupert demures, and I, in a manner that would horrify mother with its sheer commonness, prepare our tea. It's irresistible to immediately offer Xi Go hers, my brows furrowing with a patient concentration as I struggle to recall precisely what balance of water and that dense, virtually gelid brew is even remotely palatable; the final product is a vaguely turbid lake ensconced by golden shores, a luminous crescent moon of lemon and a scattering of clove stars drifting within that peculiar blackened sky.

Rupert's, and the maid's, follow; they both seem distinctly less enthusiastic than I am, though they nevertheless accept theirs with a quiet, perhaps resigned, patience. I notice that Miss LaRoche's harsh, glimmering gaze softens ever so subtly at the image of Rupert squinting with a distinctly dubious expression at the murky contents of his cup, perhaps wistfully pining for a proper English brew; it alights when those severe sapphires fall upon the panoply of pastries.

"To our friendship!" I intone, overcome with a sudden and unaccountable exuberance. For a brief instant, this feels a great deal like Saint Petersburg. With a certain astonishment, it strikes me that I no longer consider it home, but the sense of delight is no less palpable and poignant; even I'm not amidst familiar friends, Xi Go's warmth palpitates through me, and Rupert is hardly disagreeable. A chorus of thunderous silence greets me, and I realize that I've spoken in Russian.

"To our friendship!" I repeat in German. Even his stolid iron-rigid maid is forced to grant me a sympathetic smile, which seems to complete that sense of the familiar.

"Indeed." Rupert intones, echoed by Xi Go. I'm astonished to hear a similar reply from Miss LaRoche.

"Y-you speak German?" My incredulity isn't at that she can; it's that she hasn't once deigned to do so at any past moment, regardless of how awkward it seemed to cling to English.

"Of course." However indifferent to propriety she is with Rupert, she's appreciably more terse with me. For a moment, I expect a contemptuous snort and a roll of her eyes, or some biting insult. "Is anything the matter, Miss Vozmozhnym?" Her scorn is abundantly evident in every word; her severe eyes blaze with a truly terrifying fury whenever she addresses me.

"N-no, of course not. I was only a bit surprised." Relieved, for the briefest of moments; now, I've the sense that she'll simply be communicating her antipathy all the more eloquently.

"I have been with... It has been my distinct pleasure to have been with Mister Goldman's family since birth. They have cared for me very well." Her slender brows knit with a decidedly severe aggravation, as if merely acknowledging my existence is a physical anguish, or a source of complete repugnance.

"I... I see. That- that's a great deal like my- my own..." I revolt at the term, "My own maids, Maria and Valentina. I see them very much as sisters. I love them as if they are; we were raised together."

"Then, you are mistaken." A snap of unrestrained aggravation, even as her eyes darken with an unfathomable, misting jumble of emotions.

"M-miss LaRoche-"

"Jacqueline, please, if you are to be so very familial with the help." She shudders with a barely restrained rage, as if she's pondering the prospect of vaulting across this narrow distance and throttling me.

"I- I suppose that... Yes, Jacqueline would be fine. P-please, call me Kimberly." Xi Go's reassuring warmth flares beside me, though she takes no immediate action to defend me; that is perhaps encouraging, given her facility to sense another's aggression.

"Kimberly." Jacqueline scoffs, as though I'm maintaining some fatuous facade of charity toward 'the help' merely to emphasize some trivial and self-indulgent point. "That's very accommodating of you-"

"Jacqueline, please." The sudden, harsh flare of aggravation from Rupert startles me, as it seems to Jacqueline; she's momentarily frozen, a severe flush darkening her tan cheeks. "That's not fair to Kimberly. She... You have not seen her with her maids, have you? I haven't; and she's been perfectly lovely with Miss _Shego_," I notice that he pronounces it as I have, "Her governess."

"That's-"

"Please." He implores, turning fully to her, setting aside his long-forgotten tea; my own, cooling even as the lemon juice renders it bitterly astringent, clatters quietly upon the table. "Jacqueline, this..."

"I'm sorry." Jacqueline interrupts, her words emerging as a quivering hiss. "I'm- I'm very sorry. That- that was most inappropriate of me, Miss-"

"Kimberly, please." It's impossible not to be insistent; I can't bear to confront that dour surname, as if I'm my increasingly bitter and insular mother, eternally retrenching myself in these stifling, archaic traditions.

"Kimberly." Jacqueline hardly appears convinced, but her eyes remain unerringly fixated upon Rupert; an achingly tender smile forms upon his lips, and he seems to age spectacularly before us. He no longer is a jarringly awkward child; his hand rising to clasp hers with an exquisite gentleness, he seems a man, briefly offering Xi Go and me an apologetic shrug.

"Kimberly, I... I'm so very sorry." Jacqueline's exotic brogue permeates even her speech in German; my sole reply is a mild, perplexed smile and a languorous shake of my head.

"I should be." Rupert's voice remains deeper, more focused. "I... I feel perfectly foolish. This- this is very difficult for me, for both of us."

"I think that I understand." Xi Go finally interjects, a solemn wisp of a smile creeping across her rouged lips.

"Do you?" Rupert seems decidedly dubious.

"Yes." I've little doubt that she does. Her ordeal with Meilan seems all the more cruel, even as the merest reflection upon that with my present perspective inspires a miserable twinge of blazing jealousy.

"So, you understand that... Well..." Jacqueline's fingers tense with obviously crushing strain upon Rupert's remarkably fragile hand as he speaks; he remains astonishingly unfazed, aside from a brief wince. "This isn't precisely what I'm sure our parents would have expected."

"I understand." And am relieved beyond any possibility of articulation. "But, why is it that-"

"They would not approve." Rupert interrupts with a despondent sigh. "They would not understand. My parents, that is."

"But-"

"Why am I comfortable in telling you?" A solemn tugging at his lips. "It was quite obvious that you were as happy to see me as I was you."

"Nevertheless, why would you imagine that I'm not a hopelessly archaic traditionalist?" It's a bit difficult to resist, the overt nonsense of the question notwithstanding.

"Your behavior with Miss _Shego_, and the fact that you never once treated Jacqueline like the help. I know it was very brief, but we're both accustomed to..." A pause pregnant with a simmering rage with years of accumulated indignity. "Extraordinary rudeness." He finally concludes, with distinctly English restraint. "I know it is the lot of servants to be treated as such, but I... I love Jacqueline; I've loved her since the moment that we met."

"Nonetheless-"

"No one can know." A suddenly ferocious command from Jacqueline. "Absolutely no one."

"Don't you wish to be married?" The notion of their love being eternally concealed, that consummation deferred into a limitless and indefinite future, horrifies me; perhaps it's the sense of that being my fate with Xi Go, though I cannot foresee any moment at which I would renounce happiness, particularly as I now know its name, for the sake of propriety.

"That... Is very complicated." Jacqueline's countenance darkens with an overt misery, even as Rupert's pales to ash. "Very complicated."

"I think that I understand."

"I do not believe so, Kimberly." A quiet sigh floods from his tautly drawn lips as he eases forward, fastened to Jacqueline with one straining hand, even as the other begins to tap an anxious tattoo at the robust wooden table. "I do not believe so."

"Because you are master and servant? I... I do not believe that is uncommon."

"Jacqueline?" A searching whisper that rises above the uncomfortable calm. She offers no reply beyond a startlingly shy and tortured whisper of a smile. "It is not merely that we are master and servant, as difficult as that is. My parents are extremely traditional; rigidly so." He seems to agonize over the prospect of continuing, finally conjuring his will with a harsh swallow. "They... Well, my mother, namely, despises Jacqueline; she would never abide the thought of my caring for her as anything but a servant.

"Her childhood with us was dreadful whenever my father was away; I loved her more dearly than life itself. It was pure suffering in Hamburg, and I had no friends. Jacqueline was always my companion; she always cared for me." A brittle laugh. "She would even fight my battles for me."

"That's perfectly silly, Rupert." I'm astonished by how her rigid and arch demeanor softens with him, though I suppose that I should not be.

"My actual name is Reinhardt." He explains with an anemic and directionless flourish of one hand. "Mother and father insisted upon changing that, as well, when we moved to England. And we could not be the Goldmann family, of course." It's remarkable how bitterly he reflects upon that. "It was perhaps more difficult to be a Jew in London than Germany." Both Rupert- Reinhardt, perhaps- and Jacqueline eye me with an inquisitive expression, as if they expect that revelation to ignite a wailing horror at the mere notion of having shared tea with a Jew.

"I see. I... I do not know many Jews, I admit. Our neighbors were, however; they were very lovely people."

"My family fears that your parents would not react quite so well."

"They would not." I intone with a dismal sigh. "They would not. My father is uneasy with them, and mother considers them sinful and disgraceful. She barely tolerated our neighbors following years and years. I do not believe that you drink the blood of children." Xi Go stifles a startled chuckle at that with a suitably polite cough; neither Reinhardt nor Jacqueline seem particularly amused.

"Then you are more enlightened than most."

"Does... Does your religion not allow a master to wed his servant?"

"No, that is not the reason."

"Then, why?"

"We are brother and sister." I require a moment to absorb that, and nevertheless find myself posing a question of the utmost, sociable vacuity.

"Pardon?"

"We... We are not full brother and sister; she is my half-sister, in fact. My father..." Reinhardt's features are at once aflame with a seething flush, warped into a genuinely savage scowl. "He was, or is, I suppose, not true to my mother; Jacqueline was... She..." Jacqueline blazes, as well, a minute quiver seizing her fine features.

"I knew her only briefly." I'm startled by Jacqueline's whisper, a raw and tormented hiss. "She was one of their maids; she was sent away when I was three years of age."

"I remember the rows between my parents when mother finally noticed Jacqueline's blue eyes; before, she barely granted the slightest attention to any of our servants. It was only after... She found certain letters in his study from a..." It's as if Reinhardt and Jacqueline are carrying on a private conversation of their own, with Xi Go and I merely as incidental eavesdroppers; or perhaps witnesses to a confession.

"Lady Carlton."

"Yes, Lady Carlton... It was then that she became suspicious, and then violently angry. But, my father would not hear of Jacqueline being sent away, even if it meant unspeakable agony for her."

"I am happy." She does not dissemble; there is nothing but a sudden, serene joy, even through the tears that creep excruciatingly across her cheeks. "I am happy with Reinhardt." Jacqueline appears all the more elated for being permitted to use his true name.

"That, I fear, is the reason for which mother wishes me to be wed, to be separated from Jacqueline. I'm- I'm certain that she knows nothing of us, but she probably suspects; or, perhaps she merely wishes for there to be no one to protect Jacqueline. Father is much too weak to protest her cruelties any longer."

"What are you to do?" I finally ask, discovering my throat hopelessly arid. My blindly groping hands finally clutch one of the tea cups, unable to resist a foul grimace at the hopelessly alien flavor of the once gloriously familiar and aromatic delight; it's not Chinese tea, and seems positively foul.

"I do not know. I..." He musters the faintest ghost of a laugh, little more than a specter of some awful and tormented parody of mirth, before sagging against Jacqueline with a weary torment. They truly do appear husband and wife; no taboo would seem cause to separate them. "I had never expected to discuss this. I- I only wished to assure you that you had no cause to think me some odious suitor. Perhaps we've both been yearning for an opportunity to finally tell someone."

"Shanghai is a wonderful city in which to disappear." Xi Go suddenly announces, as if merely musing aloud. "It is a city of millions; an individual, even a European, is invisible. The entire land is; and I understand that Japan, too, is quite tolerant of foreigners with wealth and prestige."

"Is it?" Reinhardt finally asks, as if earnestly pondering the prospect. "To live in China or Japan? Such a peculiar prospect."

"One cannot be bound by such trivial matters where issues of the utmost import are concerned." Xi Go does not demure from lecturing them, settling beside me in a manner that seems a discreet but unmistakable and hardly cryptic message. "I have... I have lived for much, much longer than it must appear, and I have discovered that there is nothing more precious than the love that I can feel within you."

"We are in love, yes. Nevertheless-"

"I would never be so presumptuous as to command anything of you, but I will be so forthright as to tell you that you will regret every day that is lost." That seems as intensely focused upon me as the suddenly riveted pair before us; a quiet rustle of fabric resounds through a brief and pensive silence as they shuffle nearer and nearer, finally virtually intertwined as one. "And, I am sure, not every young woman will be so averse to a suitor as Kimberly; eventually, not even your very fearsome maid will be enough to dissuade girls seeking a wealthy husband, or compelled into such a union."

"I... I see. I do understand that." Reinhardt, at long last, speaks, his tone husky and harsh; he seems genuinely terrified. I find myself alighting with an almost supernatural terror with her words; every sentence seems imbued with a frightful enormity and presence by the severe pitch and tone with which Xi Go speaks, as though animating every thought with its own malevolent will. "We understand."

"But, what are you to do?" The sense of dire agony lifts for an instant, the radiant warmth of even the mildest smile blazing through the malign darkness.

"I do not know. We... I still feel very much as if we are children; we've never been away from home, actually. Coming here has just reinforced everything all the more powerfully. I cannot even speak with a majority of the people that I've met; and they approach us as if we're beasts not of this world, some dire and terrible invader that should be hated without a second thought." That conjures an image of those wretched, bestial children, huddled in the embrace of towering shadows, struggling to wring a clot of discolored and putrefying noodles from some filth-encrusted drain.

"You are accustomed to comfort; I know this." Xi Go is understanding, but nevertheless pitiless in her focus.

"I... I do not know, but I feel so unaccountably comfortable in discussing this with you, Miss _Shego_. We haven't known one another for a bit more than an hour." Reinhardt is amply baffled by that; I suppose that I should be, as well, though I've never felt anything but the utmost comfort in her presence.

"I am glad for that." Another cryptic answer. "But, what is Jacqueline's opinion?"

"Mine?" She seems, if anything, bewildered by the thought of even being asked.

"Your lives together will be very difficult. Exceedingly. Even if you ultimately inherit from his parents' estate, and even if you have claim yourself as a daughter, you may face dire challenges. Do you have any other siblings, Reinhardt?"

"No." An uneasy and angry flush writhes suddenly across his cheeks. "None of which we know, in any event."

"Do you understand, however?"

"Are you discouraging us?" His emotions seem nearly without restraint in Xi Go's presence, his lips drawn with a taut aggravation.

"Do I seem to be?"

"You're telling us how difficult this will be. Isn't that a reasonable conclusion?"

"Why are you so angry?" If anything, she appears a bit amused, a flicker of levity rising into her sensual alto.

"Because you're dissuading us from being together."

"Why are you angry, however?"

"O-oh." That swell of aggravation deflates.

"You have a great deal to discuss. Both of you. In your position, I cannot imagine being apart for a single instant, however; and I would never preserve this farce for anyone's sake. I know that there is a taboo here, but it's no greater than what many lovers face."

"I see."

"I'm not unaccustomed to discomfort, Reinhardt. And- and, you are of fine breeding. You're a very skilled draftsman." Jacqueline finally interjects, claiming both of his hands in her own; it's a peculiar contrast of the pale and dark, twilight and sunrise. "Reinhardt has studied architecture; he's very accomplished, despite his age." And, doubtlessly, a perfect suitor for me, or so our parents envisioned.

"If you're to do this, you should do so soon." Xi Go urges.

"Why?" I notice Jacqueline wince at Reinhardt's seeming obliviousness.

"You will regret every moment that you must embrace in secret; every instant where you cannot be near to one another, where you must feign this distance, will be suffering. You may comfortably live your entire lives with this lie, or you may drift apart; but it isn't worthwhile to torture the one that you love with this nonsense." Xi Go, for the briefest of instants, flares with a truly palpable rage. While Reinhardt and Jacqueline merely seem to register the flicker of anger that lunges into her characteristically composed voice, I'm forced to restrain a pathetic squeal of pure terror at the molten haze of emerald that swirls around her, leeching into my sight as if some malignant phantasm; her eyes shimmer with a savage jade cast, as though encased in that uniquely glorious stone, writhing with a sudden liquidity.

"I- I think that I understand." Whether or not he does, there's now little ambiguity as to Xi Go's words; they're a command, an exhortation boiling forth from the depths of aching loss and what feels an eternity of sorrow; her voice seethes with a raw, angry regret.

"I wish only the best for you two; I do." I've now no doubt that Jacqueline and Reinhardt are the least of Xi Go's concerns; they barely exist, save for as a convenient focus for thoughts that she's assuredly yearned to speak for ages. "I hope that you will have the strength and fortune to make a life together."

"As do I." I finally overcome the paralyzing thrall of muteness that's gripped me; it's a simmering morass of guilt, shame, frustration, and bewilderment, pondering what is to become of Xi Go and me. I love her; it writhes and coruscates through me with a desperate, electric intensity, streaking across every nerve and devouring my very soul with the sheer enormity of my desperation. And, yet, childishly, I've been as silly and myopic as I now realize Reinhardt has been; I've plotted a future of interminable childhood, sheltered in her embrace with the comfortable deception of my lover as my governess.

"I can feel... I can feel how much you love one another." They do, deeply and powerfully; it radiates from them in utterly palpable currents, a rippling mist of pure, undiluted rapture. It seems a faint haze, emanating from both, intertwining and melding into a single, beauteous whole; a peculiar metaphysical dance in vermillion, and one that threatens to wrench an absolutely bewildered gasp from me as it intensifies. It finally evaporates into the ether as I clench closed my eyes, opening them with a deliberate and fearful gradualness.

"T-thank you, Kimberly." For once, Reinhardt seems anything but miserably uneasy with me. "I would hope that you know that, well... My rejection has nothing to do with you; you're perfectly lovely."

"Thank you." That emerges as a faint murmur as I capture Xi Go's eyes with an inquisitive stare; it seems as if she can also sense something issuing from them, though she hardly appears so astonished. "Nevertheless, what are we to do about our, er, courtship?" It's miserable to even ponder such a notion, farce or otherwise.

"Why disabuse them of a convenient delusion?" That seems rather definitively targeted at me, yet again. "After all, it's not as if we mind your being together while you should be romancing our sweet Kimberly." I wish that I could throttle Xi Go, for the briefest of instants.

"That would... Would be quite a relief. You- I don't think that you could possibly understand how difficult it is to be afraid of even a glance from a butler, or some sinister gossip from one of the other maids." I most assuredly do, but I content myself with a suitably vacuous shrug in reply. "We must await until blackest night to even embrace."

"I hate it." Jacqueline intones with an abundantly familiar aggravation, though, for once, I'm not its intended target. "It's terrifying. His mother would, I have no doubt, kill me if she even knew of... Of a kiss." Pale teeth gnaw torturously at her full lips. "But, I am sorry for being so terribly rude with you, Kimberly; I was frightened."

"I can understand."

"For Reinhardt to be taken from me... I would rather die. You must understand that that is not melodramatic hyperbole; I would sooner kill myself than lose him." Her voice quakes with a miserable emotion, tears suddenly clouding those severe and expressive eyes. "Please, do not ever utter a word of this to anyone; please. I beg of you."

"I could not, Jacqueline. Not ever. I promise you that." For what reason would I? "I would hate..." My eyes briefly, inescapably, flit to Xi Go. "I would hate anyone, as well, that would separate me from the one that I love. I applaud your restraint."

"Please, that isn't an excuse. You've now been so kind to me, and I feel perfectly stupid for thinking otherwise. I've just heard such dreadful things about Russians." A beat. "And that is no rationale, either. I think that I must be losing my mind; most sincerely, I must. I'm becoming hysterical."

"All the more reason to depart swiftly, then." Xi Go is not particularly subtle.

"If... If we do not see you again, I ask that you pray for us." Jacqueline is remarkably emphatic. "And, please call upon us if ever you find yourself where we may eventually happen to be." The sheer uncertainty of that wrings a brief, fitful giggle from her.

"Wherever that may be." Reinhardt echoes. "Whenever and wherever. Perhaps America."

"The United States?" Xi Go appears a bit dubious.

"Why not? Doesn't everyone reinvent themselves there?"

"Not always for the best." A careless shrug. "But, it's now your life, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is, isn't it? That's- that's really quite a relief to even think of it. We've spent the last four years wondering what is to become of us, what our future will be; it's been impossible to consider anything but those private moments a prison."

"I'm certain that you'll be well. Trust me."

"Oh?"

"_Shego_ can see the future." And the past, it would seem. My sudden outburst inspires a distinctly incredulous pair of gazes from Jacqueline and Reinhardt, and a palpable amusement from my lover.

"Is- is that so?" Reinhardt seems quite unable to digest that.

"That's most extraordinary." Jacqueline appears less than convinced.

"Kimberly is most exuberant about a few innocuous talents. Nevertheless, I am sure that you will be fine."

"Yes. That's- that's what I meant." My cheeks blaze pathetically. "I'm happy for both of you."

"Thank you." An endearing stereophony from Reinhardt and Jacqueline, who rise at once. The tea has long since cooled to an icy sludge, the long-forgotten pastries distinctly less alluring.

"As unsociable as it may sound, I hope that we do not see you again in Shanghai." Their laughter is also of a wondrous, sonorous synchrony, Reinhardt gently easing open the door before Jacqueline, who ghosts into the gathering twilight with an elegant flourish and the quiet click of heels.

"Thank you, again." He offers with a sincere, steep and courtly bow, before vanishing, as well.

"That's the man who is to be my suitor? How impolite, falling in love with another woman." That elicits a quiet snigger from Xi Go, who finally, blissfully, avails herself of the opportunity to ease beside me as the door rattles closed. I feel myself melting into a pool of utter, inarticulate ecstasy at the tender weaving of her slender limbs around my waist, tugging me gloriously against her sublime warmth.

"I'm glad that you're able to laugh about it, Kimberly; you weren't so delighted when he arrived."

"It was perfectly horrible, _Shego_, to hear that I'd be... Be courted by some man that I'd never met. I..." Contorting myself with an awkward struggle against her wholly intractable strength, I, at last, manage to capture her gaze. "I want to be with you; I need to be yours."

"You are mine." At once, everything beyond this embrace ceases to be; nothing seeps into that convulsive haze of utter rapture, my eyes suddenly awash with a gleaming eruption of tears, streaming in molten arcs along my cheeks. I can feel a violent, irrepressible tremor tear through my suddenly piteously frail body, even as my chest swells with a volcanic heat that blazes more fiercely with every instant that I continue to live.

"I- I am?"

"Of course." I adore even that slightly snide chuckle; the gentle sultriness of her breath washing across my throat as she eases near to me inflames me further; I'm certain that I'll scream with the delicate brush of her full lips against my throat, the slightly tacky quality of the rouge further heightening that ecstasy. "You are mine, Kimberly; you have been since the moment you were born." It's a quiet murmur, barely the subtlest prickle of sound, but it arcs like lightning across my skin; that mild, susurrating vibration is absolutely electrifying.

"_Shego_, I... I..." Her hands freely rove across my flesh, gliding in languorous strokes upon my shoulders, along the exposed swath of my arms; a furious, raging inner voice, thundering in its immensity, begs for her to press forth toward that relentless, gnawing core of my need. I yearn to feel her lithe fingers upon my chest, where my hands once quivered with such indescribable longing; for my heartbeat to roar through her palm, to carry itself through her body.

"Yes, Kimberly?" It's infuriating but absolutely glorious when she pauses in the teasing rain of kisses with which she showers my neck, periodically rising to my chin, and falling with shivering, blissful intensity upon my collarbone. I fear that I'll be crimson from her rouge, never mind the blazing flush that manages to deepen with every instant.

"I don't want to be away from you. Ever." That dissolves into an incoherent moan with a sudden, jarring, but unaccountably wondrous nip of her teeth at the achingly sensitive flesh at the juncture of my throat and shoulder. "I..."

"I know, Kimberly. Do you believe that I'd ever allow us to be separated, now that I've found you again?" I should be reeling with vexation at how she speaks of this wondrous, eternal union, even as she refuses to elucidate even a single kernel of it, but my bleary thoughts cling to the utter splendor of the kisses, heated and more forceful, that follow. I'm reclining, enervated and limp, against the cushion, arching longingly with every sublime escalation.

"No. No." My words emerge as a tortured whisper, hissing from between lips drawn taut to stifle the endless stream of keening moans welling into my throat. "No, _Shego_."

"I'll never, ever allow what Reinhardt and Jacqueline are suffering afflict us; never. I can't bear the thought of being apart from you ever again. If I must, I'll take you away from everything."

"Yes!" That shout is irrepressible, given life with the sheer force of the delight raging in my breast, rumbling within my heart.

"You're so very beautiful, Kimberly; every part of you." I can't believe how I thrill at that, the sense that I'm not so hopelessly unremarkable in her arms; that I'm not merely another bland, pitiful little girl in her embrace, as she beholds me with such gloriously luminous eyes.

"A-am I?" It's not a vain yearning for her to repeat that, even as I cry out for her to shout that again, and again, and again, until those words eternally ring through my very soul.

"Yes. Yes." I begin to whimper in complaint at the halt of her kiss until her eyes lock with mine, her burgundy lips parting with a palpable anticipation. "Oh, yes, Kimberly." I don't expect that her slim fingers will at once lace around my wrists, clamping them upon my breast; that touch, that sudden, blazing heat, rising with every second, is positively overpowering. Only the abrupt, bruising pressure of her mouth upon mine stifles a wailing shriek of unbelievable delight. It's as if she's devouring me, swallowing me and every feeble whimper that she coaxes from me with the mildest, most fleeting caress.

"_Shego_!" I can barely, breathlessly, muster a gasp of pure, mewling rapture, my voice quivering with an irrepressible need. I crave her with a power that I simply cannot understand, but which will tolerate no further delays; I can't muster the slightest shred of patience. I'll pounce upon her like a crazed wolf.

"Kimberly, we cannot here." It's true; I've hardly the slightest inkling of what promise she offers with her smoldering eyes, but I can't envision it confronting my parents' unbending approval.

"W-where?"

"Just... Just be patient for a moment. Please." A request that's positively beyond my toleration. A petulant tantrum is beginning to well within me at the thought of deferring this any further, even as she raises me to my feet with the most trivial effort. My legs throb and tremble, my shuffling gait excruciating in its sheer, stumbling awkwardness as I'm drawn forcibly toward the door.

"Why?" I don't care if I'm shouting. I feel as if I'm upon the cusp of death from this fever that roils with an impossibly desperate, furious intensity; it propels me against her, whimpering and gasping, nearly collapsing again from the briefest graze against that heat which throbs from her.

"Because, how am I to show my love to you properly if we need be concerned about an interruption, Kimberly?" A fiercely strained patience; I know that I'm frustrating her, and I don't care. Thoughtlessly, as I cling to her before the door, my lips glide across her throat in a quivering and inept imitation of her own wondrous kiss. That she nonetheless convulses with a sudden, halting gasp is absolute bliss; I don't expect that I'll discover myself whirling about with impossible swiftness, pinned with a muffled thump of my shoulders against the rugged wood.

Even with my heels, it's so very, very evident how spectacularly she seems to tower above me; jade begins to trickle through darkest sloe, heavy lashes beating across her creamy cheeks as her full chest heaves with ragged pants. There are no further words; she claims me, fingers raking softly across my waist with a sudden and unbelievable intensity that's nearly terrifying. Her hands begin a shuddering, gliding caress across my hips, briefly, torturously ghosting along the curve of my rear in a touch that sends my pulse racing with such fury that I'm certain my heart will explode.

"You're so lovely..." A kiss, and another, and another, punctuated by that wondrous refrain; I'm unable to speak, her lips claiming mine the instant those words have caressed my hazy senses. It's as if I'm experiencing the world from behind a diaphanous curtain of lace, my sight sluggish and my hearing distorted by the blood thundering in my ears; but every sensation is magnified impossibly, the subtlest caress becoming a savaging welter of pure rapture that rends every nerve and virtually collapses me to my knees. "You're beautiful... So beautiful..."

"Oh, god..." I can speak, at last, wracked with ferocious pants as her lips fall to my throat; her hands join at the small of my back, forcing me against her voluptuous figure, weighty breasts glorious against my own. It's a fervent, pining prayer, raised to the heavens with a brittle whimper while she plunders me. She feels like a wolf as she tenderly mauls me, gently prickling teeth further heightening that sensuous majesty that streaks across me with the fall of her mouth, again and again; a tender suctioning; even the giddy, tingling perfection of her tongue, lashing and gliding across my neck.

"_S-Shego_..." Please. Please. Whatever this is, don't allow it to halt for the briefest of moments. I don't care if it's a dreadful and unspeakable sin; I care for nothing but this, nothing but your touch. We meld together, shuddering and gasping, virtually becoming one despite the agonizing layers of fabric that separate us; my own gown is becoming matted with a fine and blistering veneer of sweat to my breast, my breath coming in furious, panting gasps of this suddenly gloriously perfumed air. "D-don't wait for anything. Please. Please. Please!" A strangled scream. "I don't care about my parents, about this stupid courtship." And she halts, parting from me with eyes wide and lips parted, the glorious and silken form of her tongue anxiously darting along them.

"W-why did you stop?"

"Because, I... I want this to be proper, for this to be right." Xi Go nevertheless appears as if she truly is a fierce, feral romantic hero, yearning to take me here.

"What do you mean?"

"I want to you to experience everything possible... I... I want to be gentle; it should be tender, and sweet. Even... Even if..." Even if we've made love in hundreds of past lives together; there's no doubt of what she intends. "Even if it feels as if we've never been apart, you... You haven't ever felt this; you're as pure as a freshly blossomed lotus. Please." Xi Go's eyes blaze, her lips drawn, every breath an excruciating intake of air; I believe her.

"W-when?" Somehow, with her tender guidance, it feels as if I could endure an eternity; or perhaps merely five minutes further.

"Now. Now. Not here, however. Please."

"Yes." An irresistible yearning to sob overtakes me as I'm released, sagging against the unyielding wood, deprived of her wondrous embrace. I find myself being tugged away from it, the door creaking open with barely the minutest trace of sound; little more than the gentle chirping of a sparrow, I'm nevertheless terrified that it will attract the attention of the entire household.

It astonishes me to discover that the sun has begun its languid descent beneath the horizon; that molten flare virtually invisible above the soaring vermillion peaks of the wall, merely an aura of liquid ocher spilling across the stone, carelessly staining everything that peculiar dappled gold. It seems as if we're invisible amid the smoldering dusk; no servants traipse about beside us, and my parents are conspicuous absent as I'm ushered into the main hall, and then away again toward my chambers.

An uncanny and unbearable excitement pulses within my breast as we dash in silence as swiftly as my stumbling pace will allow atop these heels; I can't even pause for the briefest of instants to remove them, simply tugged further and further toward the fruition of that most sublime promise. Archaic stone, smoothed and weathered by the elements, becomes rustic and blissfully luminous wood, casting a singular light upon my senses. Even amid this dark luster, however, it seems as if Xi Go gleams with an impossible and supernatural light; a luminous jade that envelops her completely, accentuating every wondrous sway of her hips, every effortless lunge of her lengthy legs.

For once, at long last, she opens my door; and my bedchambers have never seemed more inviting, even as I'm certain that I'll faint with the accumulated need that ravages my raw nerves. I feel terrified, as well; my stomach blazes, a tortured sheen of sweat swelling across my brow.

"_S-shego_, I..." I am afraid; it feels as if I am a bride upon her wedding night, awaiting that forbidden caress of her love. The door eases quietly closed behind her, and she stands before it, a smile of the most beauteously serene majesty forming across her lips. "I'm afraid."

"I know." And that pulsating terror vanishes with the beatific cast of her features, offering me a gentle nod of understanding. "It's all right. If... If you-"

"I do. I want- I want you to show me, _Shego_. Please." I'm a complete innocent; I've never even pondered any dimension of this, never understood anything of the elegant euphemisms that the more worldly girls exchanged. I merely know that it's a physical expression of love; that it's the transcendental height of a woman's wedding night. And that, as she takes me in her arms, that it will complete us; that I'll finally experience what's eluded me.

"I love you." I believed that it needn't be said, that it was so intensely, achingly evident that the words were almost trivial; I feel a quiet, wracking sob in my breast shatter those delusions, tears lunging into my eyes as I cling to her with a renewed desperation. The words to capture such an incomparable elation elude me; I can only answer with my own tremulous, weeping joy.

"I love you. I- I love you so much, _Shego_. I love you." And she kisses me. It's as if we never have; it's as though we've never touched, never been so near to one another; that we've never savored anything resembling this intimacy. Her mouth claims my own, melding with a liquid and shivering heat; my eyes snap open with impossible breadth as her tongue eases against my lips, electrifying me with that tender, insistent pressure. Pure instinct lures my own to hers, sparring and clashing awkwardly; I feel us move even nearer, her fingers interlacing almost shyly, with a trembling delight, with my own. Her hands are powerful but so delicate, soft and blazing with a seething heat, even through my gloves.

"Make love to me, _Shego_." For a moment, I'm certain that she'll be the one to collapse, even as my cheeks are set afire and my voice shatters into whimpering incoherence when I speak those words.

"Yes." And she guides me to the bed; I settle in that comfortable and familiar position, seated atop the mound of silken sheets, even as this wholly and beautifully foreign sensation sweeps across me like an ocean current. My gloves are gently shed, Xi Go delicately plucking them, finger by finger, away from my hands; they tumble carelessly to the floor at my feet, and I'm lowered with the utmost, aching tenderness upon my back with her soft and feminine caress.

"I... I don't know anything... I... I mean..." Will it be painful? Will it be glorious? Will I disappoint her?

"I love you." She soothes my wrenching anxiety, even as her roving fingers ignite a desperate and shivering craving within me. "Let me show you everything, Kimberly. Let me make love to you."

"Yes." As if she even needs to ask; the convulsive shiver shooting through me, that heat rising again to unbearable heights, would probably force me upon her if she were to refuse. She doesn't, however, slim and elegant digits taking hold of the satin ribbon binding my bodice, releasing it with a sudden whisper of fabric; my own gasp wells above that at the sudden and staggering kiss of the cooling dusk air upon my bared skin.

"You're so beautiful, Kimberly." Xi Go's voice quivers with an unutterable need, and she repeats that again and again as her hands fall to my exposed chest. I'm unable to restrain a scream that I hope vanishes into the gathering darkness, that bewildering warmth engulfing those modest mounds that suddenly alight with an exquisite sensitivity. It's as if I'm being blazed with an ocean of flame concentrated upon her supple skin, and I know at this moment that I can never bear to be deprived of it.

She kneads them, palms of silken sublimity rocking with a tender, level cadence against throbbing peaks that shriek with incomparable, electric ecstasy with every caress.

"_Shego_..." A roll of her shoulders casts away that broad hat that shades us, her raven locks spilling across our bodies in a momentous rain of ebon silk. Fine, downy tendrils play across my blistering flesh with an almost cruel, teasing splendor; I arch against her, my eyes never abandoning her own. I'm drowning in them; my breath hitching in my chest, barely able to quench that stifling need for the sultry air that she perfumes so magnificently. I long for a glimpse of her touch upon my skin, but I cannot bear to wrench away my gaze from her own; weighty lashes fluttering upon her soft cheeks, lips parted as she finally kisses me.

It's overpowering, that sudden and furious confluence of those singular sensations. I'm certain that I'll collapse from that alone, my sight blackening for the briefest of moments; I'm snapped back into reality with a mild but wrenching pressure upon those fine pebbles, her mouth swallowing my sudden scream. Xi Go's lips quirk into a delighted smile against my own, and I feel her warmth engulf me all the more intensely; she lowers herself further atop me, a sudden and beauteous pressure, a heat throbbing through our gowns.

"Kimberly..."

"I love you." Ever more with every passing moment. My eyes are agape, a muted wail tearing through my throat as a sleek and gently muscled leg brushes between mine, the pressure intensifying upon my breasts. I recognize this, abruptly and almost jarringly, as what I experienced beneath my own touch; but it blazes with a fury beyond anything I could have aspired to achieve alone. My sight whirls and my breath comes in ragged, rending pants; my stomach is straining, tensing with a most delicious pain; that molten, shuddering heat between my legs is rising to a furious pinnacle.

"I... I feel... I... I..." My jaw works with unintelligible, pathetic madness, struggling to form a single coherent word that even begins to capture what I feel. There's nothing; I'm soaring to an impossible peak, and I love it. I can't bear to be deprived of this ever again. I need her. I... I need that.

"I love you." I begin to protest, to rage and wail with utter torment, at the vanishment of one of her hands from my breasts until it materializes upon my thigh. That sends a blinding flicker through my vision, a sudden and glaring sunburst that devours my sight. She effortlessly hikes up the hem of my dress; I feel it bunching between us along my waist, the frail fabric compressing with a gentle pressure upon my stomach. That sudden, icy chill seems to sizzle all the more furiously upon my now bare legs; her hand tracing an urgent and pining pattern across the seam of my stocking and inner thigh. "I love you." She repeats, as if pleading for permission to touch me further with those words.

"I love you." I offer my wailing, yearning demand with that feeble whimper, and she finally does. Her fingertips play along that hypersensitive juncture, ghosting along the silk, trailing briefly along my bare skin, until she finally jolts further toward what I know must be the absolute core of that throbbing need. That desperate, lustful, craving, mad, wanton need.

Her hand's pressure upon my breast ever so subtly rises with each instant, forcing me nearer and nearer to a lunatic apogee of sensation. Now, every touch is almost agonizing; the brief flutter of some distant breeze upon my skin; the delicate and sultry wash of her breath; the relentless, surging delight that her fingers wring from me.

"You're so close, Kimberly." Even she feels it as she touches me, ever more intimately, her fingers snaking in a serpentine and languorous dance across my legs; she darts between them, even as I part them more fervently, driven by some visceral, fierce instinct. I wish to draw her nearer to me, toward that urgent, wet heat that feels as if a flower in a rain shower, dew drops beading within me, seeping with almost excruciating bliss from within those petals.

"I... I am. I am." And I shiver, tensing and lurching against her with an ecstatic thrall of mingling terror and delight as she finally draws aside that one lingering barrier. This... This, I know, I have nothing but certainty, is the core of my love, of my lust, screaming and howling and begging for her. "Please!" I finally give voice to that excruciating craving, that desperate, yowling, yammering, relentless and irrepressible and irresistible _need_.

"I love you." Again, and again, she whispers this, kissing with a frantic cadence across my cheeks; the flutter of a butterfly's wings, hot and wondrously, transcendentally sweet, before she claims my lips again. It's a crushing, bruising, and almost pitilessly powerful kiss, tongue lashing against mine, swallowing everything when it finally arises without warning and without preamble.

It's a touch; a singular, quaking, shivering touch of almost tentative fingers. The tender stroke of slender, lovely perfection upon slick petals, gliding with an inquisitive grace that sends every thought into a whirling plunge toward oblivion. My eyes fall closed, and then widen to goggling immensity as I find perfection, find bliss, find liberation; it's the end of the world, my very soul straining as my body stiffens, her touch finding me, at long last. A savage, seething, volcanic heat wells into me, and I scream, and scream, and scream, and scream until my throat is raw; I continue to cry out, and she drinks every shout, every tremulous and mad wail like most sublime ambrosia.

It's nearer and nearer at every instant, everything coming as a blur, lithe and graceful curves arcing and fluttering across a palpitating pearl. Breath is meaningless; thought is meaningless; all life but this is meaningless as I shriek incoherent odes to our love, poetic nonsense more powerful and meaningful than anything I've ever spoken. And I am completed; a barrier suddenly broken, slick and wet and molten delight clasping around her questing caress that, at long last, consumes me as desperately, as wantonly and hungrily, as I devour her.

She cannot release my lips for a moment; I refuse to allow it, crushing her to me with suddenly raw and irresistible strength as she touches me. She touches me; she's touching me, stroking and exploring, gliding through what feels an invisible barrier of the soul as we meld together. There is no longer even the distance of our bodies, of our separate beings; we exist together, and I love her as she loves me. We throb and shiver together, a thundering fugue that melds into a wondrous unison that finally, finally breaks into an impossible crescendo.

This is what I've approached, again and again and again, crying out for fulfillment. And nothing could aspire to compare with this. A silent scream, the sight of Xi Go's beauty and her scent and my own and the quaking, endless, scorching rapture that winds and blazes across me, weaving through every nerve and suddenly bursting. Time slows, everything building to pinnacles unthinkable, before it explodes. I arch and quake and jolt, bucking and flailing like a being possessed; that delirious honeyed magnificence that enfolds me, that pours from within me, that washes across her and me at once seems to devour everything.

I scream, once again, with an unparalleled climax at that peak; I know that I've attained something impossible, a fulfillment and completion in her arms, beneath her touch, that nothing will ever approach; that this is ours, singularly and completely ours, as her kiss deepens further, soothing me as I begin to weep.

Tears stream from my eyes, and I can't bear for her to continue a moment further, even as I pray and plead and beg for her not to stop. I kiss her, kiss her, kiss her; this relentless, restless, craving cadence that gleams and sighs with a most beautiful, soft tenderness.

"I love you!" I sob, feeling as I'll crush her fully into me as I grasp Xi Go with every trace of might my feeble body can hope to muster. "I love you!"

"I love you." Her whisper floods over me like a summer breeze upon a winter's evening, and I melt into my love with a shuddering sigh.


	8. Eternity

"I love you." Those words, that blissful and sublime, incomparable delight, caress my bleary and reeling senses as I stir in this peculiar and transcendental thrall; it's a state of heightened consciousness, of hypersensitive torpor, at once beyond and of this world. Her warmth engulfs me, a throbbing and relentless joy that further stokes that smoldering rapture to infernal peaks; my mind gradually emerges from the disoriented haze that's gripped it since succumbing to that extraordinary, shimmering explosion of forbidden and foreign delight. My breath continues to come in fierce, wracking gasps; I feel my chest swell and strain, an unendurable tension gripping me, now inspiring some unutterable need that wreaths my sight and writhes and snakes through every nerve. It convulses me, guides my lips toward hers anew. With that incomparable, glorious, electric caress, life floods into me in a liquid torrent, a thundering deluge that forces open my eyes, suddenly alight with a truly supernatural awareness.

"I love you so much, _Shego_." My voice quakes, but I can finally coax those words from my aching and parched throat, mangled from the screams that continue to resound through this beauteous world of darkness that has enfolded us. "That... I..." Words elude me; my bounding and frantic thoughts are of nothing but that seething, flowing majesty that continues to throb through that molten heat that's briefly dipped to merely a craving simmer.

Her eyes claim mine again, even as our mouths meld and mesh with that delicious, unparalleled heat. I feel as if we're truly melting, flowing together with molten bliss that sends arcs of ecstasy once unequaled through me. Even now, however, I crave again that incomparable height; that soaring, delirious, frightful pinnacle that robbed me of sense and reason; that reduced me to a shivering, quaking child in her embrace, writhing and jolting with a rapture unimaginable.

"I love you, Kimberly." And I dissolve into inarticulate gibbering at the tantalizingly sidelong glance with which she fixes me; I'm pinned, enervated and shivering, to the sheer silk that seems arctic against the majestic, simmering warmth that my love radiates. That glorious, ephemeral death- soaring to peaks that could only be divine in her embrace- seems to loom massively again at the delicate and playful tug of teeth upon rouged lips.

"W-what was that?" It struck me with such furious, unwavering, explosive intensity, with a mad, infernal and overpowering splendor, that I could hardly even grasp it as anything but a thundering tidal current of raw ecstasy.

"What was what, my sweet Princess?" And another truly pathetic, demure shiver ripples across my body; I feel my fingers tingle, curling anxiously upon the wondrously delicate fabric of her gown at those words. She is my own Princess, claiming me with such wondrous tenderness upon what feels our wedding night; a romantic heroine as fiercely passionate and beauteous as anything that a romance could portray.

"What... What I felt." What devoured me, tore through me, rent asunder every nerve and reduced every muscle to a blazing pool of shuddering weakness. "When you touched me." I can barely conjure even the mildest, shyest whisper as I grope for those words.

"That, my Love?" She, with such sweetly playful cruelty, continues to feign obliviousness.

"Yes!" Could there be anything but that? I feel as if the world has narrowed to nothing but her embrace, the continued warmth of her fingers against me; those lovely, slender delights cling with an exhilarating dampness to that gentle swell atop that desperate, throbbing core of my need, but I can virtually feel, with such mad and urgent yearning, them elsewhere. It raises a hopeless and blistering flush to my cheeks, but I finally understand what it is that's eluded me so maddeningly; that height that I could attain solely in her presence, beneath her questing, tender touch.

"Release." The supple warmth of her hand, delicate and velveteen, suddenly clamps upon that mild swell, a brutal lighting arc of concentrated sensation shearing through me.

"_S-Shego! Shego!_" It's so near again, so fervent, pining, and maddening in its gnawing intensity; it's positively irresistible.

"Yes, Kimberly?" Xi Go teases with such unbearable cruelty, though a bleary, fragile smile nevertheless creases my suddenly drawn lips. Beads of perspiration, stout and scalding, scour across my brow; they trickle in an unrelenting, simmering march along my cheeks, rolling in blinding streams into my goggling eyes.

"It... It feels so strong. I- I..." I need it, crave it, again, and again, and again; a furious, narcissistic craving for her to worship me, to bask in the unparalleled sublimity of her touch. The deliberate, achingly gentle massage of that unyieldingly majestic heat against me is overpowering; so delicate, so torturously mild, prodding me nearer and nearer to that transcendental height, but never allowing me to plunge again from that mad precipice.

"Yes, Kimberly?" That needling, sweetly sadistic whisper again, damply caressing the agonizingly hypersensitive shell of my ear. Xi Go has lowered herself fully atop me, restraining me with the blistering heat that boils forth from her sinuous form.

"W-why are you torturing me?" Those words dissolve into a rapturous squeal with the sudden, seething magnificence of the pliant pads of her fingers across that quivering, yearning pearl.

"I'm sorry, Kimberly... You're so sweet; I love every cry, every whimper... It's such a beautiful serenade." Xi Go's tone dips to an achingly delicate murmur, raining a litany of apologetic kisses along my cheek; a low, keening cry wrenches itself from within me as her lips wander to my throat. And I indulge her without thought, without restraint, as that pressure intensifies upon that most blisteringly sensitive of points, unfettered by everything as I raise my voice in a squealing, wailing welter of unparalleled bliss.

Wondrously, she refuses to halt; nothing restrains her, even as I buck and jolt, her ministrations escalating ever further with each wondrous, reverential brush of her fingers across that glorious core that sends rippling tides of the most exquisite and impossible bliss scouring along every nerve.

"_S-Shego_... I... I..." I beg, needlessly, that magnificent cadence merely accelerating with every instant. I feel that begin to well again within me, that seething, insistent, almost cruelly explosive tension that throbs and palpitates with a bewilderingly sultry heat.

"Please, Kimberly." That glorious plea seems virtually a command, and I find myself irresistibly obeying; it washes over me at once, without thought, without focus, a babbling current of that coruscating, blistering delight lunging from that molten core across every inch of my suddenly superheated skin; it flushes through me, heat intertwining with a sensual electricity that wrenches open my eyes even as they tense closed with the seismic, quaking convulsions that overtake me.

Impossibly, it's even more powerful than the first, more focused; it's unclouded by that gauzy and supernatural delirium, permitting me to savor every shred of it, and I'm certain that my brain will simply dissolve with the sheer, savage ecstasy that overwhelms me. Her delicate ministrations refuse to halt; so too do I, quivering and jolting again and again and again; that pinnacle seems merely to heave me further and further, soaring to paradisaical heights, shuddering with an abruptly mute rapture.

"_S-Shego_!" That finally emerges from my ragged throat amid furious, gasping intakes of the cooling air that blazes like a desert wind across my lungs. It's incomparably magnificent, however; tinged with an utterly singular fragrance that melds with her own exotic perfume. It's of unrivaled sensuality; so sweet that it seems nearly cloying, the harvest of overripe peaches tinged with jasmine. "P-please..." I can't bear it any longer; that electricity has become a relentless, coruscating stream of lightning, scalding me with its raw ferocity. Intuitively, she halts, embracing me with an effortless grace; her slender limbs lace around my quaking body, kissing away again the tears that flood of their own volition across my cheeks, mingling with the saline streaks of sweat that continue to stream from my brow.

"Kimberly..." She soothes. I feel as if I've died, again and again and again, and I'm overcome by the sense of true transcendence; of having transgressed some forbidden boundary, savoring a knowledge of pure, visceral, sensuous perfection that lies within the realm of the divine. "I love you."

"You... I..." And I begin to sob; deep, fierce, wracking sobs of revelation. We've made love; Xi Go has claimed me, consumed me with such blissful magnificence, such excruciatingly tender and lingering passion.

"Kimberly? A-are you all right?"

"Yes!" I'm overcome by a sudden and unaccountable giddiness; a hysterical laughter that begins to snake through that intricate fabric of interwoven, nebulous emotions. It's a jubilation beyond anything that I've ever savored; it eclipses even the heights that claimed me amid that blistering, shuddering release. It's a sense of bewildering paradox in the rapturous sorrow that's overtaking me; a certainty of an irreversible transition, a transformation, into which I'm so ecstatically tumbling. It's a clenching, seizing volcanic splendor that unfolds within my breast, enveloping my body and soul in the folds of a love beyond love, that no words, no thoughts, no past experience could ever have sought to capture.

"Y-you're laughing." Xi Go seems more than a bit bemused, even as her arms crush me to her with ever swelling strength.

"I know. I know." A lilting and feminine giggle that shears through the tears, that overwhelms even my sobs of utter rapture.

"But... Why?" Even a sorceress, I suppose, is unable to fathom the infinite depths of this sublime madness that's overtaken me.

"Because I'm so happy, _Shego_. B-because, because... I..." What words could explain this? Even with every remaining instant of this life, of this soul's perseverance, how could I conjure the grace and eloquence, the pure, poetic perfection, to capture the sense of being so completely perfected in her arms. It's a multifaceted, multidimensional grace that overtakes me, that swaddles me in the warmth of the angelic; that bathes me in a shimmering light that's blazed away the tortured darkness that I only knew existed for its sudden and glorious absence. "Because I love you." And it, at once, is so familiar and so alien; a certainty that I've attained these incomparable and impossible heights throughout all eternity, even as I reel with the sheer, singular enormity of it, beyond anything that I could ever have envisaged in this life.

"And I love you. I love you so much, Kimberly." In a peculiar, blinking instant, we've shifted again; we lie upon our sides, inseparably intertwined, my legs interlaced with hers, the sleek, delicate warmth of her gown clasped beneath my clinging palms.

"We... We made love, didn't we?" Those words, shy and virginal, emerge as a hopelessly piteous whisper, little more than a miniscule wisp of a breath that nevertheless ignites a savage flush across my cheeks.

"Yes." A reply of truly beatific tenderness, a palpable joy swelling into her voice. "Yes, we did."

"I... I don't know what to say." A murmur of the utmost mortification. I should assuredly be composing sonnets of tribute to her magnificence; my mind screams for me to do so, to raise my voice in joyous adoration, even as my soul presses me nearer and nearer to her, as if, nestled against her breast, I could simply inextricably blend with my love.

"Kimberly, you... You don't need to say anything." I do not; my attention remains riveted upon the gentle, regular rise and fall of her chest with every rustling and unhurried intake of breath; upon the wondrous, throbbing palpitations of her heart.

"I'm... I'm just amazed." I am. The notion of being wed, of being wholly united with another, terrified me; I could identify it with nothing but the cruel tyranny of some undesired marriage, a union wrought of political convenience or rapacity. I'd longed for nothing but an eternity with Ariadne, enveloped within an idyllic world of perpetual childhood; reality eternally in abeyance to accommodate that gentle and naïve fantasy, basking in nothing but those delicate, lingering embraces and aching cravings to be ever nearer to her.

I've discovered what that true bliss is in Xi Go's arms. It's a sense of union, a connection, without separation; souls and bodies intertwined inextricably, without fear and trepidation. It transcends merely that insistent warmth; it's a supernatural heat that blazes and rages, that claims us without shame and without restraint. It's an all-consuming madness to which I can only avidly, rapturously surrender myself. It is, truly and completely, love. I love her; I need to be with her eternally, to be hers, for her to consume me as completely as I do her.

And I kiss her. With a wondrous startlement, Xi Go's eyes snap open to bewildering immensity; it seems almost uncannily innocent, as if she's now the chaste and trembling bride upon her wedding night, the sheer, riotous, passionate energy of my sudden embrace overcoming its fumbling awkwardness. Intuitively, irresistibly, my tongue finds hers; even as those glorious sloe pools narrow subtly again, nonetheless alight with a transcendental bliss, she permits me to lead as if immersed in a singularly intimate dance. I claim her mouth, the tender and mewling litany of quiet cries that I coax from her with every delicate, moist stroke a reward of ambrosiac sweetness.

"Kimberly!" She actually pants as we part; her milky skin alights with a sudden flush, lustrous with a gently feminine perspiration. It's become warmer and warmer, even as the sun begins to evaporate from the sky; merely the faintest glimmer endures, dappled with a darkly luminous aura of mingled violet and dying burgundy.

"That... That wasn't everything, was it?" My confidence evaporates as I ask that, but I maintain a fervent, feverish inner prayer that it isn't.

"W-what?"

"I mean... That is..." In a thrall of utterly desperate mortification, I capture that entrancing warmth again, and again, and again; I kiss her until my mind reels with a panting, gasping delirium, a heady breathlessness that seems virtually narcotic. "When you touched me... Is- is there anything more?" I'd expected, with a certain abashed dread, the inevitable laughter that those words elicit; I hadn't quite envisioned that it would be such an exceedingly deep and resonant chuckle. It begins as a supremely delicate and almost girlish giggle, darkening to a low and throaty wave of pure, sensual promise; my arms obligingly dissolve at that, my breath hitching in my chest.

"There is, Kimberly." And she kisses me, no longer so subdued. It's firm, fiercely insistent, but so oddly chaste; a continual, crushing press of her lips upon my own, virtually starving me of breath until we separate, both drawing furious intakes of air. "So much more." That whispered delight rustles damply against my throat. "I thought that you'd never ask."

"Well, I..." What could I have asked? I barely even understand what transpired amid that shivering bliss; merely the vaguest sense of those trembling, quaking, wailing moments of utter transcendence lingers upon my fevered mind, a fleeting dream.

"You're not afraid, are you?" My only reply is a sudden, harsh swallow, a flare of anxiety shearing through what was once calm.

"N-not afraid... I'm just a bit worried." I yearn to touch her as she had me, to bestow upon her that incomparable, soaring bliss; I'm truly terrified that it will be a miserable disappointment, that my awkward and wooden hands will simply be pathetic by contrast with the glorious, deft majesty of her touch.

"About what, my love?" Another kiss, briefly quieting those yammering shouts of insecurity that return again the instant that we part.

"I... I don't want to disappoint you." I don't; I can't bear the notion. It's a perfectly silly and outlandish terror, but no less urgent and palpable; that directionless and yowling agony at the notion of Xi Go being disgusted with how pitifully cumbersome and inept I am. That... That I may no longer be the lover that's seemingly accompanied her throughout the ages, my embrace as perfect and wholly unerring as her own.

"Disappointment?" I'm relieved that she doesn't laugh, regardless of how tenderly; that her sole response is a tightening of her powerful and sleek arms around me, an infinite softening of her smile and the luminous, comforting joy eternally blazing within her dark eyes.

"Well, I... Your touch- it's... It's like nothing I've ever experienced." That sense of release, of total rapture. How could I ever possibly hope to describe it? "_Shego_, you... You've completed me; you've made me feel something impossible." And I'm hopeless to even begin imagining delighting you so utterly.

"It's all right, Kimberly; truly, it is." Another soothing whisper, though it hardly allays my fears. "Have... Have you ever, well..."

"Yes?" Anything to divert my attention from this gnawing insecurity.

"Have you ever..." Xi Go seems to struggle with even broaching the topic; I can only envision how mortifying this will be. "Have you ever touched yourself like that?"

"Like what?" A profoundly guileless and idiotic reply lunges from my lips before I can even ponder what she's said; my face's cast reddens beyond vermillion when it finally, belatedly, occurs to me what she intends. "N-no. That's-" That's sinful, I prepare to instinctively reply; anything so... So erotic, so indulgently rapturous, must be; it's fornication, about which I've heard interminable admonitions.

"Yes?"

"I- I haven't." A further flaring of humiliation at how ridiculously unworldly I am. "I... I didn't even know that I could; I never knew that anything like that existed."

"Never?" Xi Go simply appears utterly incredulous, even as she struggles to force an almost ridiculously gentle neutrality into her dulcet voice.

"I... I felt something like it, when..." When I thought of you; when I pleaded for your lips upon mine; when your face flared through the ether as if a phantasm, taunting and teasing me with an elusive and unfathomable delight that seemed so much like death itself. "When I held my breasts, when I... When I thought of you." I'm barely able to speak those words for the certainty that she'll truly believe me a silly child; remarkably, her face alights with a deeper joy.

"That's... That's so wonderful. You... You can enjoy yourself that way alone, though."

"I don't want that." A sudden and jarring, almost petulant affirmation. My courage swells in a sanguine current, and I can't bear to restrain myself a moment further. "I want you, _Shego_... I- I want to touch you like that, for you to touch me again. I want to make love again." Astonishingly, her sole reply is a harsh and tortured swallow, as if unable to quite believe what I've said. A delicate tremor flits through her hands, shuddering through my blistering skin.

"We will." A breathless and hoarse whisper, so simple in its alluring promise. "We will. I'll show you everything, Kimberly; I'll make you feel everything that you could never even imagine."

"Yes." It's my opportunity to tremble; I feel as if I should offer prayers of hopeless sacrilege, tributes to Aphrodite and Eros for this bliss. "Yes."

"There's something that I want you to experience, Kimberly; again, and for the first time." A thoroughly cryptic murmur that electrifies me with its possibilities.

"W-what is it?"

"Close your eyes, Kimberly." I remain frozen, mind struggling to even conjure the slightest inkling of what she intends.

"_Shego_-"

"Close your eyes." I do; a whine of protest erupts from my mouth as she vanishes, suddenly and without preamble, from my grasp. I remain reclined in that indecent repose, skirt bunched around my waist, baring that most sensitive and... It's not sinful; how could anything so glorious, so perfect and truly spiritual in its magnificence, be a sin?

"All right."

"Don't open them until I tell you, Kimberly." I shiver with that voice; it's the commanding tone of Xi Go, my governess, that wondrously tender tyrant that captivates me with every word of every lecture.

"I promise." If only I hadn't promised. A litany of periodic, quiet tones; the faintly melodic strains of metal; a sudden, flaring warmth and glimmering luminosity creeping into my clenched eyes.

"Please, open your eyes, my Love." I do, even as I melt with those words. As they part again, lashes batting almost drowsily upon my cheeks, I'm stricken by the sense that day has returned with a resurgent fury; but that rich, flickering ocean of incandescence doesn't radiate from beyond the garden, now engulfed in darkest and most impenetrable shadow. That wondrous gleam emanates from the lanterns secreted away within the depths of the chamber, those elusive and peculiar lamps that I'd not even noticed originally; they cast a haze of sensual and lurid crimson, staining everything but Xi Go with that most peculiar and glorious sheen.

Remarkably, she gleams with a most singular light of her own; it stands around her, enfolding her, accentuating the shy smile playing across her full lips. She stands frozen before the bed, slender fingers steepled upon her chest, as if awaiting some incantation from me to return to life. I'm likely disappointing her as I simply continue to gape, at long last permitted to savor that incomparable sight without fear or haste, to linger upon every nuance; the gentle play of the dark fabric across her wondrous, elegant curves; the fall of her majestic mane across her shoulders, midnight upon emerald; the faint flush staining her cheeks; the limpid ebony of her eyes; the sleek and lustrous lengths of her legs, clasped in those alluringly shimmering stockings.

"I love you." It's barely a ghost of a whisper, so faint that I barely realize that I've spoken. "You're so beautiful."

"Thank you, Kimberly." Perhaps she truly is as devastatingly insecure as I am, despite her vibrant, untamed and almost riotous splendor; those words throw her into sudden and startling motion, slender digits purposefully playing across the glimmering silk. "There's something that I've yearned for you to see since the moment that your eyes fell upon me."

"I- is there?" I'm typically oblivious, struggling to puzzle any solution to my most recent quandary.

"Yes." She resolves it for me, unfastening her _zanze_ with practiced ease; a graceful and elegant stroke of her slender hands sends it tumbling from her body, pooling silently upon the crimson-stained wood beneath her feet. My eyes are agape; I can no longer draw breath, transfixed and paralyzed by a sight of truly angelic perfection. I've longed for this moment, craved it with a desperation unutterable; my mind has, in brief, fitful, and trepiditious flickers, supplied images of her splendor, as if drawn from a distant and ethereal memory.

I realize, now, as I finally absorb the pure and beatific majesty that is Xi Go, that those could never have been memories. Her beauty is divine; whether as a sorceress' conjurations of youth and magnificence or an enduring natural glory, I wish to weep at the sight of her now bare form. Her incomparably fine and milky skin darkens further with a radiance that raises a flush of my own across my cheeks; my throat is arid as an ocean of sand; my fingers tremble with a sudden and almost irrepressible yearning to experience the creamy perfection of her flesh beneath my touch.

Her breasts, full and weighty, fall with a delicate and impossibly lovely grace beneath her hands folded upon her heart; they seem to sweep with a poetic elegance toward the fine, gentle roundedness of her stomach, firm but of a singularly feminine softness. I virtually demure from the sight of that glorious nest of sleek raven surmounting what my searching eyes know immediately is the core of her fervent yearning for me; I'm unable, unwilling, to avert my gaze for the briefest of instants, and I know that she would desire nothing less. It's a full and plush contour; a fine and lovely darkening of her skin that absolutely entrances me; the thought that my fingers may touch her, caress her, explore her as her own had me ignites a blazing boil of craving within my own heat.

She's retained her garter and stockings; the belt delicately encircles her slim waist above the full and glorious flare of her hips, brittle strands linking the fine lace with that lustrous darkness. My love continues to soar upon shoes that further accentuate the graceful, lengthy beauty of her legs; she steps away, the quiet click of heels resounding as if thunderclaps through the silence otherwise unbroken by even my breath.

"_Shego_..." That nudity, that complete and beautiful vulnerability, is beyond description in the jubilation that it sends soaring through my chest. She reveals herself to me without shame, without fear, without anything but a yearning for my love, for my adoration; and I lavish it upon her in a sudden, babbling stream of delighted coos, hoping and praying that this moment remains indelibly graven into my memory, so powerful and intense as to bridge lives and time. "My god, _Shego_..."

"Kimberly..." A subtle tremor ripples through her voice, and I realize that I'm rising, dress tumbling awkwardly back across my chilled thighs as I struggle to my feet. I'm not afraid; it's a sudden epiphany that's nearly terrifying in itself as I finally feel myself emerging from that surreal and self-imposed childhood from which her tender love and beauteous, transcendent caresses have begun to coax me. I love her; I need her; I cannot bear for the slightest distance to separate us. And I begin to unfasten my own gown as she stands enraptured.

"_Shego_, I love you." I crave your touch; I burn for the caress of your eyes upon my skin. Those words will perhaps never rise from my trembling lips, but my quaking fingers finally unlace those few remaining obstacles to an indescribable desire. A quaking, fearful faintness overtakes me as, my eyes fixed with a desperate anchorage upon Xi Go's own, that fabric tumbles from my shoulders, sweeping across my waist and hips with a whisper of silk upon skin, spilling upon the floor at my feet. "I..." Am I a disappointment? She's glimpsed me in a similar state of undress, but never amid this glorious and surreal, sensual haze. By contrast with Xi Go, I seem nearly a child; the gentle swell of my chest is so pathetic against the full and heavy majesty of her own. My legs, slim and shapeless, are unlike the graceful, sweeping perfection that lifts her so spectacularly above my height.

"You're beautiful." A jarring epiphany that she's now before me, the velvet warmth of her hands clasping my cheeks, tilting my eyes toward her own, ruptures that gnawing and neurotic insecurity. "You're so beautiful. You're more beautiful than I could possibly have imagined." My knees become water as that glorious whisper ghosts through my senses; a shock of raw, scalding, blistering delight coruscates along every limb at the sudden brush of skin upon skin.

I finally know that nothing separates us; nothing divides us. There, at long last, is no distance, no torturous and cruel gap of even the frailest fabric. Only her flesh greets my own as she embraces me, seizes me with the fierce intensity of her gaze, deeper and darker than a moonless night. Her hands explore, inquisitively following every contour; the arch of my throat; the planes of my shoulders, plunging along my arms that quiver feebly at my sides.

Xi Go is a woman; full, bountiful, unparalleled in a beauty that grips my heart with an aching delight. I still feel little more than a girl, shy and alight with a tortured blush that stains even my toes with a scalding heat. And, yet, she gazes upon me as a lover; her eyes do not see a child, a feeble and helpless, pitiful creature. My lips strain with a trembling smile, even as her own ease nearer and nearer and nearer, closing that maddening and insufferable distance with a deliberate, teasing cruelty. Raven magnificence rustles and whispers across her cheek, brushing against my own skin as she leans over me; she claims my mouth with an unhurried delight, savoring every flare of molten rapture that arcs between us with that meshing of indescribable, wet heat.

Our fingers interlace again as she grasps my hands with a gentle insistence; our tongues twine and play, a graceful and liquid dance that leaves me panting and breathless with each brief parting. A playful, tantalizing clash, sparring and recoiling; our chests heave together, that full and pliant pressure almost suffocating in its sheer, unbelievable glory. I yearn to touch her, even as I stand paralyzed, drunk and bleary with a gauzy ecstasy that mists my eyes with a vermillion lust; I can bear only to kiss her, to touch her. I can abide nothing but an eternity in her arms, clasped in this embrace of bodies and souls.

"Kimberly, I love you so much." A subtle shift yields the graze of pert, throbbing pebbles across my chest, brushing against those peaks upon my own breasts with a gentle friction that ignites a flurry of electric, gasping delight. "I need you."

"Yes. Yes." Those words flood from me in a sudden and furious gasp. I burn to touch her, to savor every inch of her milky softness beneath my caress; to inflame her as she does me; to please and captivate her with my fingers. To raise her to those divine heights in my arms.

"Will you let me show you, Kimberly?" I can barely muster even an anemic nod in response to that, paralyzed by the boiling sensuality of those words. A vulpine smile creeping across her dark lips, I feel myself being guided again to the bed; the wooden frame brushes icily against the backs of my knees, and I virtually tumble onto the cool, rustling silk. Xi Go looms above me, silhouetted against the crimson aura of the lamps, even as she silhouettes the room with her own pure, crystalline light.

My eyes betray me; I yearn to remain fixed upon her own, but the effort to restrain them in their roving exploration of her body is beyond herculean, and I am weak. My tongue snakes between my lips, laving unconsciously along them with a soaring need as I behold her so near to me; the plush and voluminous fall of her breasts, the sleek roundness of her abdomen... And, finally, majestically, I shyly admire that forbidden majesty; darker than the alabaster of her skin, it seems virtually to throb beneath my gaze. A fine, pale pearl stands in beauteous relief from folds tinged with a fine pinkness that raises wonderment about my own. Her petals glitter with a dewy dampness; she's scented with an absolutely bewitching fragrance that sends a quivering compulsion through hands that ache with an inarticulate need.

"Is it what you'd imagined, Kimberly?" Xi Go's voice startles me; my eyes snap to hers as if a naughty child discovered amidst some appalling mischief. I'm desperately embarrassed, even as I know that she desires this as fiercely as I do; perhaps I still cannot believe that she desires me.

"I... I don't know." A hot and ragged whisper. Truly, my imagination could never have conjured anything so extraordinary; merely the vaguest sense of what lay beneath those elegant, sweeping gowns tormented me, seeping into every dream, teasing me with a tantalizing curiosity at every instant. I hope that she'll tolerate my awkwardness, my total innocence and insecurity.

"Do you want to touch me, Kimberly?" Yes! Desperately, with a furious and irresistible longing. My sole answer is another tortured nod, my hair rustling with almost theatrical severity against my cheeks.

"I want you to touch me, Kimberly. Please." The words, 'I don't know what to do,' hover upon my lips, daring me to speak them; instead, my hands rise of their own volition upon her skin, motivated by some urgent and searing instinct. However inept I may be, the gasp that greets me drowns me in a molten tide of pure delight, a mild shiver flitting through her ample body; my own trembles, those shuddering quakes coursing through fingers that now linger, still and frightened, upon a softness beyond compare, beyond description.

It's as if the substance of dreams has been granted living form, pliant and glorious and absolutely sublime; surreal in its sudden, raw and undeniable sensuality, it dimples and whispers beneath my caress. Xi Go remains silent; I can feel her gaze fixed upon me, blazing with a feral craving barely in abeyance, even as her slender fingers tenderly graze along my cheeks, beginning to comb idly and wondrously through my hair. She doesn't guide me, simply permitting me to explore, and I do; every stroke, every brush is a deluge of electric bliss. This is a moment that my fevered dreams could never have sought to rival in its perfection, that fervent and maddening heat rising again to scalding peaks, feeding upon the glory that is our joined love.

"Kimberly..." She whispers my name as a mantra, repeating it with a reverential delight, her lips caressing it with a passion that I could never have believed I would inspire. Her slim and graceful fingers begin to shiver, wracked with a straining tension in my locks that seems a thundering command to me. "Kimberly, I..." My palms glide, questing along the sleek and soft plains of her thighs; they ripple with a faint muscularity beneath that sheath of utter femininity. Finally rising toward that palpitating core of her most wanton and irrepressible need, I allow my fingertips to dig gently into her skin; a mild, prickling pressure, intensified by the fearful uncertainty that hammers in my chest. Her silk stockings are abrasive as ragged stone against the plush splendor of her legs.

"Please, touch me." Xi Go seems to have been restraining those words, that furious plea that now bursts from her straining jaws in a frantic gasp. "Please, Kimberly." I should be frozen with a thrall of anxiety; it feels nearly a sense of liberation, Xi Go finally impelling me toward that penultimate experience, that consummation. My reserve and childish fears begin to melt beneath the blazing tremor of her voice, and I, at long last, do; my fingers rise to the downy softness of the fine, sleek curls that surmount her core, silencing any further pleas or protests from my lover.

I adore it; I bask in this, the sense of incomparable connection as I comb through locks that my eyes have never glimpsed; fine and silken, every curl whispers beneath my fingers as they begin to trail down, down, toward something truly forbidden. I thrill with an indescribable excitement, finally touching her; finally wringing a low, sobbing moan from her that wreaths me in a torrid and sultry mist of lust. It's a craving to finally please her, to... To pleasure her; to delight her.

"Kimberly!" A low, aching gasp as my questing caress finally finds her. She blazes with the sun's molten fury beneath my probing fingers; my eyes widen at the sudden and bewildering richness of it, that decadent and sensuous softness that's more extraordinary than anything I've felt in this blur of erotic delights. It's plush, velveteen, delicately surrendering to my inquisitive caresses; a strangled scream, her body stiffening to glorious, shuddering stone, greets me at the first brush against the pallid pearl that lures my eyes irresistibly.

"_Shego_, I'm..." I'm astounded. We're making love; I'm touching her, at long last. It's alien, extraordinary; it feels a brush with the divine, with a goddess, so very real in smoldering flush. My other hand joins its twin, grazing along a fine seam that reminds me of a pair of lips, gently weeping a most singular dew. It's blistering, slick, strands delicately and wonderfully clinging to my fingers as I touch and explore; every experimental flicker of my fingers yields a new and exhilarating whimper or cry from her. I realize that I'm enraptured, bewitched; I'm entranced and addicted, craving every gasp and moan.

"D-do you like it?" I finally ask, pleading and praying for the answer that will complete me.

"I- I love it. I love you." No guile lies in those words; they roll across me in shuddering waves, impelling me further and further. "Please, don't stop, Kimberly... Please." Xi Go actually begs; she pleads and beseeches me, alight with an intimacy that transcends mistress and servant, governess and student... Even between woman and woman; a gentle demand of lovers, of a secret and pining intensity that guides me further and further, as if every quiet murmur, every lovely and sobbing cry is an instruction that solely I can understand.

"A-are you close?" It seems foolish to parrot those words that she whispered so hotly to me as she pleasured me with a touch more expert than my own, but I crave that forbidden knowledge; to know that what she feels even begins to approach my own rapture.

"Yes. Yes. Yes, I... I..." A brief glance at Xi Go's beauteous features, flushed and glistening, affirms that she is; I'm suddenly unable to avert my sight, finding incomparable delight in her gaze. Her eyes are enormous, wide, liquid; they seem nearly to tear, enormous lashes falling upon her creamy cheeks, drawn taut with the strain gripping her, as weighty lids descend. "Kimberly!"

I have no answer but to intensify my caress; clumsy, awkward, directionless, but flaring with a passion indescribable, I touch and tease her, tantalizing her body and soul with fingers that blaze with a tingling purpose. I love her; I need to raise her to those incomparable peaks, to electrify and consume her as she had me. I need her to swallow me with her love, to devour me as I do her. Xi Go's hands fasten with an almost brutal pressure upon my shoulders, straining to suppress what would probably be a crushing anguish that becomes an aching delight, another confirmation of my success.

"Kimberly, I... I am..." She pitches forward, suddenly cloaking me in the vast fall of her ebon mane, the silken softness of her stomach straining against my lips as she's convulsed with a desperate, bucking quake; she pulses and writhes, a startling and glorious tide of that singular liquid pouring from within her, staining my fingers with a sensual, slick splendor. I cannot bear to halt, wringing new and tantalizing moans from the very depths of her being; her soul seems to weep forth with every wracking, keening cry, every low and incoherent whisper of the utmost rapture.

"Kimberly! Kimberly!" Xi Go doesn't seem to care any longer if we can be heard; I never had, delivering a delicate and dainty pinch to that magical and unique bud. It feels as if those exotic petals part further, flowering with a blazing glory as my eyes are drawn again to her; I can't resist the yearning to delicately open them as if the most glorious rose, beholding a velvet pinkness that throbs with a florid, incomparable magnificence. "You're..."

And I allow my fingers to continue their explorations, struggling against the obscuring haze clouding my lust-savaged memory to recall what she had done to exhilarate me so wonderfully. Slender digits emulate her own ministrations, even as I find myself being crushed again to her. I'm amazed when she yields beneath me, as if some barrier simply collapses beneath a mild but insistent pressure; a slick, clinging softness engulfs me, swallowing me at impossible depths.

"_Shego_... It... It feels so amazing." I whisper that with the utmost reverence. I'm transfixed, suddenly still amid satin walls that throb with every pulse coursing through her; I can feel the beat of her heart, thundering and explosive, as it resounds through this delicious embrace.

"K-Kimberly... You're really- really touching me there." She whispers as if awestruck; I can only offer a shy smile in reply. "I... I can't stand any longer."

"All- all right." I haven't the slightest inkling of what I should do, but my legs decide for me; a quiet groan of the utmost anguish greets the withdrawal of my finger from within her as I ease away from the bed, allowing her to settle with a glazed bleariness upon the silk. Finally, it's my opportunity to tenderly guide my lover onto the sheets. Xi Go reclines with a quivering trepidation, peering up at me with an expression that I can only imagine mirrors my own; full lips tremble; limpid eyes glimmer with a delirious longing; her jaw strains, her slender and swanlike neck arching as I settle atop her in a feeble imitation of that blissful embrace.

"Kimberly... Make love to me, Kimberly." It feels almost masculine, suddenly finding myself above her, bracing myself awkwardly upon fragile arms as I drown within those glorious, vast oceans of most wondrous black. Her full, ample and feminine perfection is bared to me; her voluptuous, trembling thighs parted; her sleek and graceful hands fasten delicately upon my arms, drawing me fully upon her, crushing my lips onto her own.

"_S-Shego_... _Shego_..." I love her; I immerse myself wholly within this, within her, my fingers darting again to that slick and blistering splendor. She arches, body writhing against my own, her abundant and majestic chest swelling with a sudden, gasping intake of breath at the press of slender lengths beyond a shivering barrier. I touch her; I make love to her, easing a second slim span beside the first. At that, she screams; I devour her wanton, whimpering professions of ecstasy as avidly as she had my own. I realize that I'm also moaning, our cries mingling together in a stereophony of liquid beauty, sloshing through my senses with a drowsy and surreal delight.

Against the struggling, clenching tautness, steel beneath tenderest, plush softness, my fingers stroke; shallow, tentative, and shy. Agonizingly shy, terrified that I'll wound her, that I'll commit some terrible blunder as I caress that throbbing flesh.

"Kimberly... You're..." Those words spill from between us as I separate for a savage, tortured intake of air. A most transcendental scent encircles us; honeyed and cloying, it's the harvest of an orchard at its ripest peak, a tantalizing flood of feminine sweetness.

"I love you, _Shego_." My eyes snap open, agape, my entire body rigid as my very being, my senses and spirit, narrow and implode upon that one gnawing, yammering, craving center of my longing; her own fingers have entered me, piercing me with a tenderness that renders my own touch callous and bestial by contrast. I manage to continue my ministrations with a shuddering effort; that joint stroke, ragged and unequal, throbs and sways. It seems a manic fugue; the plunging, gently rolling caress of her own slender digits occasionally converging with my own touch, merely to suddenly diverge again.

I know that I'm near; I understand what the urgent and pleading heat signifies. It's a volcanic flower that unfurls into a straining, quaking eruption, my vision reddening as I continue to pleasure my love. She seems to find completion, that swollen height, at that very instant; perhaps the relentless, crushing grip of my own body floods through her as gloriously as her own does into mine, pouring and sloshing through my me like an electric torrent.

Incredibly, impossibly, I do again; and again and again and again, my fingers gently curling within her, gliding along exotic textures and an ever swelling softness, churning in dewy and wondrous welters around my touch.

"Kimberly! Kimberly!" She rocks and bucks as I do; it's quickening to a manic cadence, pistoning and writhing, swaying and colliding. We crush together, struggling with our utmost might to meld into one; our souls flow together, mixing into a single, cohesive boil that bathes both of us in the purest light of our love.

"_Shego_... I..." Words become impossible; they're nothing but meaningless breaths amid that incomparably eloquent poetry of our bodies and hearts. Our chests heave together in perfect and beauteous synchrony; our lips mesh; our tongues dance and our legs entangle, pressing both of us nearer and nearer to some impossible joint transcendence.

Alone, beneath her patient and tender touch, that sensation was as if a poignant, heroic death; a sense of total liberation from this plane; an ascendency toward the divine. A caress upon the face of the Infinite; an ambrosiac word from the Ultimate cascading through me. Touching her, I felt as if I were that goddess. As we move together, swaying like a willow amid a lashing storm, drowning in this unrelenting, liquid ecstasy, I feel that was merely an insipid prayer. This is true deliverance; beyond life and death, pressing through a curtain once cinched impenetrably closed, behind which lies something incomparable.

At once, those prosaic and simple sensations, however bewilderingly glorious, become meaningless; sense and sight and touch and taste and scent wither away into gray, gauzy irrelevance. Everything, at once, surges into impossible definition. I taste the fruit of impossible and unearthly trees in her embrace; her lips bear wisdom that words could never impart; her soul reverberates through mine, carrying with it a liberation, an extinction of all that is worldly. We soar together, interlinked, screaming and whimpering; kisses become savage gouges in the fabric of what I once knew; every stroke of lovely and graceful fingers becomes a flame that blazes away an obscuring mist.

The love that we share, that echoes and throbs between us, becomes an explosion that ruptures the vessel that constrains us to this mortal plane. We fly, interwoven as one thread; we rise and rise and rise until mere height becomes as trivial as a plant's breath.

We love; it's so complete, so all-consuming, that it could only be in her arms that I attain it. I love her; I love me; we're one, her adoration coruscating across every nerve.

And it explodes, a thundering, shattering sunburst that blinds me; that scalds away everything but her. Xi Go is Xi Go; she is my love, an eternity in human form. I am Kimberly, and everything; an unbroken chain of one link, bound to her. I feel something indescribable flowing through me, and I embrace it; it writhes in my grip before surrendering, before it seeps into me once again for the first time.

I love her. I weep and sob and we collapse together, tears staining my cheeks as we remain so impossibly intertwined. Her gasps join my own wails of joy, and we silence one another with a kiss; her eyes blaze emerald through the dark, and yet are of the deepest and most beatific sloe.

"Kimberly." Eyelids flutter open, lashes beating a ferocious tattoo upon damp skin at the melodious strains of her her voice. I've a sudden glimpse of myself, captured in the vibrant and expressive pools before me; the image, my bleary thoughts ponder, should be terrifying in its peculiarity. It feels merely natural, however, my smile- bruised lips parting with jubilant rapture- unfolding to join her own. A luminous, supernatural jade gleams upon my eyes; an impossible and lustrous glimmer that blazes through the suddenly complete and all-enveloping darkness that's overtaken us.

It's as if the sheer, thundering intensity of our lovemaking, our joint, sighing, gasping release, has extinguished the lamps; as if it's expunged the very moon from the sky. Solely the light that pulses from within us endures, a glorious inner radiance that spills in lustrous tides across us.

"_Shego_." That emerges as a hoarse gasp; my raw and ragged throat protests with every breath, every struggling whisper an ordeal.

"I love you so much." I'm enveloped in her embrace; completely engulfed by her warmth, slender arms and shapely legs intertwined with my own. Our bodies seem inextricably blended; slick, blazing sweat unites us as assuredly as our interlaced fingers, the level and soothing throb of her heart roaring through my chest with every timpani resound. The cool night air trickles across my skin, chilling my back; a certain, lingering insecurity raises a renewed flush across my cheeks at the awareness of my nudity, even as I delight in it so completely with her.

Xi Go and I have made love; I to her, and Xi Go to me; together, joined, we've perfected one another. That epiphany is a streak of lightning through my thoughts. We've made love; I now know what has eluded me, that incomparably sensual rapture that I craved and for which I pined with a shuddering madness. And, yet, it cannot be known otherwise. Even if she had painstakingly explained every gasp and every caress, every motion together, it would be describing that unrivaled transcendence with mere words; as futile as capturing paradise in a looking glass.

"I love you." Again, and again, and again I repeat this, as if I may never again be allowed to speak those words that send my soul vaulting into ethereal heights. I kiss her, and kiss her, and kiss her; she clings to me, fastening us eternally together. In the depths of my soul, I feel a flower blooming; a blossom of light more brilliant than anything nature could conjure, filling me, swelling through my breast and searing along every inch of my body with a wondrous and unparalleled warmth.

"_Shego_." It's my voice; truly, at long last, my voice emerges with that peculiar sensation that I at once recognize. My thoughts unite with a distant memory; nebulous but powerful, poignant and beautiful glimpses of images from a past that I know is mine. There is no envy as I see my own hands upon her skin; as I feel as distant echo of her caress upon flesh that could only be my own.

"Kimberly." My love seems to recognize that, as well, a remarkable sense of astonishment settling upon her features. She doesn't appear troubled or overjoyed; simply startled, eyes widening impossibly.

"_Shego_." I whisper. I can now conjure her true name, Go Xi, into my mind, but my voice continues to cling to that; it's my own. I was consumed with a terror that this body, this life, had merely been vacant shells of transmigration; that I would cease to be, perhaps some piteous vestige of this fragile and tiny being enduring with the return of Xi Go's love. But, I am her love; I am complete, wholly myself, Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym; I am myself. I am her love.

"You had never left, Kimberly." Xi Go soothes the few aching vestiges of fear, dousing pathetic embers with a typhoon. "I... I did not know what to say; I know now that I should have reassured you that you would remain you." A smile of unequaled luminosity parts her dark lips, swollen with the intensity of our embraces. "I fall in love with you, again and again, with our every meeting; but it is because I love you always." She guides one of my hands to her cheek, her own clasping mine; I feel fine streaks of dampness form upon that creamy splendor, even as stout droplets begin to spill across my own.

"I'm so happy."

"And your name is always the same, my love." I start at that, even as I have no doubt of it.

"It- it is?" My name has always been Kimberly?

"In essence." A mild and lilting giggle. "I knew from the moment that you introduced yourself that you must be my love."

"Why?" I marvel at that, even as I had no doubt from the very first glimpse of her unearthly magnificence that I could never again bear to be parted.

"We... We have been united, and parted, many times since our first meeting, Kimberly. But, you joined me in prayers, of divine mudras and petitions to the gods, to grant us that knowledge even if we were separated; you always have. I..." A tortured thought streaks through our minds at once, but she stifles it; I feel it seeping away, as well. "Your name, and your soul, will always be familiar; in different guises, perhaps, but always known to me."

"Who was I? A- a long time ago, I mean?" My eyes mist with tears at the thought of ever again being separated from Xi Go; she is perhaps a goddess, such a powerful sorceress that she can command such indulgences from her peers. She could only be immortal now.

"Kimberly, you... You are you. Why does it matter?"

"Why do we both cry, _Shego_?" We are; scalding and tortured oceans boil within my eyes, even as my voice quakes with a terrible grief. I can feel the loss of parting; whether from my own memories or hers, it blazes with excruciating fury. "Please."

"Do you truly wish to know?"

"Yes." I don't dread this knowledge; I embrace it with an eagerness that I can hardly believe.

"We have... We have been together many, many times. When we originally met, however, it was amid a period of extraordinary violence. I... I had long since parted from my master; we would reunite occasionally, but this was our first separation. I was ecstatic to have found the power in the _Tao_ that his tutelage granted me, and basked in its strength and possibilities.

"I thought nothing of wielding such strength with the utmost frivolity. Never... Never with cruelty, but with complete thoughtlessness. Diverting a river to suit a moment's whim, to water my garden or some poor peasant's field, was a simple task." I reel at that. Xi Go speaks of it with such extraordinary casualness, as if it truly was no more challenging than opening a faucet; I can only visualize how powerful she has now become.

"I was a nuisance, or a menace. The local governor and his officials despised me; they sent warriors against me, crude and cruel men with no compunction about wielding vulgar threats and indiscriminate violence. They terrorized the local villages nearly as savagely as they sought to me; but I crushed them, again and again. It was as though Monkey routing the forces of the Jade Emperor; even their own mystics, powerful adepts in the _Tao_ and Buddhist zealots, could not best me. My master was a man who had bridged life and death; he taught me forbidden wisdom that had eluded even Xihuangdi.

"But, then... It became altogether too much. As much as I felt as if I were righting injustices and warring against the evil that had tormented me in my childhood, that..." Xi Go offers me a guilty and solemn smile. "That had parted me from Meilan, I was harming more than I helped. Farmers whose fields were irrigated by a shifted river became flooded and destroyed. They believed me a demon, an accursed goddess devoted to destroying them, even as I naïvely, childishly continued with my games."

The whole of it seems some extraordinary fantasy, a romantic glimpse into a past of magic; an age in which man's foolish incredulity had yet to slay its own potential. Xi Go's wondrous voice caresses me, every word of such transcendental drama, even as I'm overcome by her incomparable tenderness. Her embrace is blissful and unparalleled, a joy that sends a blazing and sublime heat along every inch of my skin, despite the sense of overpowering cold beyond this aura of supernatural comfort.

"I suppose, in retrospect, it was simply foolish; but that strength was absolutely intoxicating. My mentor had never taught me anything about restraining myself. He was a man of exceptional power, and never believed in confining it; he would plunge boulders into the soil to avoid walking around them, and raise himself so that he needn't bother with a mountain path.

"But, I was considered a demon, even if I were little more than a young girl who had discovered mysteries that humans should perhaps not approach. The magistrate of a large village, near to the administrative capitol, became ill; he was once a great warrior who had been offered the appointment not by Confucian merit, but by defending the Qing against a Ming rebellion. It was said that he had slain five-hundred men with his sword. His name was Jin Jun.

"Perhaps Jin Jun would have bested me had he not been stricken with a terrible illness; a fever that soon would ravage so much of the land. But, he collapsed as he approached me; he cried out in unspeakable anguish, and, as I raised my hand to strike him down, my rage vanished. I hated the wealthy and the powerful; I despised those of privilege and means, for they had been nothing but suffering to me. But, Jin Jun did not insult me, or condemn me, or even dismiss me as an upstart peasant; he smiled, tears welling into his eyes, and told me how proud he would be to die at the hands of a true Immortal.

"His only regret, he said, would be never to see his daughter wed; he had no sons, and his wife had died years before. He loved her so strongly that he had never taken another. He had raised his daughter as a son, instructing her in _wuxu_ and teaching her to read, even though it had been forbidden. He spoke her name as he lay dying before me: Bao Li.

"For the first time since fleeing Meilan's home, I felt pity; a warmth that suffused a heart that had once been only stone. It had layered upon me with crushing cruelties, but it broke as I saw that man of strength collapse, whispering that name as though the Buddha's. I could not allow him to die. And so I began to channel the spirits of the the Middle Kingdom and the divine; and he stopped me as I was upon the cusp of returning his youth and life to him."

"Why?" My voice is husky and harsh; I realize that I haven't spoken for what feels an eternity.

"I asked him that, and he answered that an immortal cannot allow another to cheat death; that they will sacrifice their power as surely as the sun sets and rises if they return life to one who has lost it. He would not allow me that, instead permitting me to grant him time; time to see his daughter again, as if he had never ventured out of his village. And so I flew with him to his home; I saw his daughter. She... She was beautiful, but she met me with such cruel eyes as we descended. I heard only hate from her, felt only rage and grief as I returned her father in such a pathetic state.

"He was unable to speak; he could only be with her, to savor those final few days in her arms as she cared for him. I..." A despondent smile creases her lips. "I envied her desperately as I watched them from afar; her father loved her, so much so that he was willing to battle a monster for the survival of her village. And she wept and wept as he fell further away from her, but would never display her tears to him; she remained a fierce and righteous warrior of which he could be proud.

"On the final day, at the turn of the lunar month, he died. She would not cry, would not shed a single tear of grief. I did not understand; their rituals were familiar to me, but her behavior was so alien, so uncanny. She bound her hair in a queue and donned armor that was much too large for her; she slung his sword with the ease and comfort that he had, as if she were Wei Mulan. I did not understand, but followed her, surreptitiously, in her trek toward the mountains; I lingered in shadows, and guided animals to her to be hunted with her bow. I pitied and respected her; she was glorious, with skin as pale as a lily and hair blacker than the night.

"Then, I realized what her desire was as she approached my fortress; the palace of stone that I had wrought from the mountain's face, rife with delights that I had looted from merchants. She called out to the demon, screaming and raging with a sudden flare of anger that was beyond anything I had ever experienced. It was the hate of a daughter, and not the anger of a warrior. She bayed for my blood, and I felt as if I would weep.

"She howled that she would avenge her father, that the monster that had cursed him would never breathe another breath so long as she drew her own. And I appeared before her in a gown of white silk; she thought me Guanyin, compelled to discourage her from her task, until I spoke."

"I... I don't understand."

"I still spoke as a country girl, crass and ill-mannered; I could never have been the Bodhisattva. And she lunged at me without another word; the stroke of her sword again and again came nearer and nearer to me. I was terrified; a truly extraordinary power lay within her, channeled with an unconscious fury that flowed with the tears that glimmered in her dark eyes. I could have taken flight, or I could have buried her beneath stone; but I was transfixed, and I was ashamed. Perhaps I had killed her father; the very journey to my palace had probably wounded him, or exacerbated that terrible illness. I thought that I might eventually surrender as she began to tire; her swings became awkward and feeble, and she fell to her knees, weeping bitter tears, clawing at the dirt with her fine fingers as she apologized again and again to her father for her failure.

"And I embraced her. I folded her in my arms, and I felt a warmth that I had not since becoming Meilan's maid; she sobbed, even though I knew that she hated me. She was perhaps afraid, or she could simply no longer bear to fight. And she returned home; I grew lonely. But, I remained there, maintaining a vigil for her father; I held ceremonies of tribute to them, and dedicated myself to my duties as if I were another of his daughters. I do not know why; but I knew that I felt nearer to Bao Li than I had anyone since Meilan. I offered great gifts in sacrifice; I performed intricate rites and the sacred mudras to the gods. I even beseeched the Jade Emperor to allow him across the golden bridge.

"Above all else, I longed for Bao Li to return. I had become infatuated with her; I felt my breast ache with a grief I could not understand that grew deeper and more agonizing with each day. And, yet, I could not bear to abandon my fortress; I practiced day after day, becoming ever more powerful, honing my understanding of the _Tao_ and fashioning mystic alchemies to perfect myself. I pleaded for her to return.

"And, at long last, she did. She screamed at me with the fury of a demon, wielding again her father's sword, again clad in his armor. She flung arrows in a flurry; the sky itself seemed to blacken with them, lancing into the earth around me. And she hurled herself at me, limbs lashing, body flowing with the grace of a serpent; she sought to strike me, attacking again and again, until she, at last, exhausted herself as she had before. And, again, she wept; she howled with torment at having failed her father, wailing to the heavens her regret at her failure.

"I could bear it no longer. I took her in my arms, and embraced her; I held her as she sobbed and struggled, as she revolted at the touch of a demon. I weathered her fists and the lashing of a blade that she unleashed from her armor; I endured her insults and her hatred with flesh of stone, even as my heart felt as if it would shatter with the sheer force of her loathing for me. I could not bear to release Bao Li, however; I could not endure a moment without her at that instant. And, when finally she stilled, she slept; she slept as if she had not for the two years since her father's death.

"Bao Li had become more beautiful with time; a lovely and glorious maiden that would have been without peer if she had not sought to avenge her father. She would have wanted for nothing; husbands would have thrown themselves at her feet to be embraced, for even the minutest flicker of her smile." My own widens at the sense of connection that I feel with this legendary beauty, a pulsating thread that streams beyond the horizons of my own memory.

"But, Bao Li would have nothing but retribution. Even as she slumbered, tucked in my embrace, I feared that she would wish for nothing but my destruction again as she awoke. I wished for nothing more than to ease into her mind, to dissolve that mad and baseless anger with a soothing caress, but I could not; I feared changing any part of her, removing any measure of that passion flaring in Bao Li's heart that electrified me.

"As she awoke, she asked-"

"Why did you not kill me?" I'm jarred by the sheer intensity of that sudden memory, as if my life and soul have converged, for the briefest of moments, with Bao Li; my voice is as if hers and my own at once.

"Y-yes." Xi Go's wondrous eyes glisten with an astounding jubilation at that. "Yes, she asked me exactly that. She was confused, bewildered; she had thought me nothing but a demon, a creature that had destroyed her family, and yet... How could this terrible devil have spared her, have swaddled her in its warmth and sheltered her throughout a bitterly cold night? She finally spoke with me, without hatred, without anger; she was curious.

"I, myself, had been. I had never felt this tenderness and attachment; not even to Meilan. I felt, for once, that all distance had disappeared between this noblewoman and me, that we were as one as she lay weakly in my arms. I remember how she blushed as her helm fell from her glorious mane, how she fell silent as I kissed her, suddenly and without thought. It... It was something that had gnawed at me since my time with Meilan's family.

"We... We had embraced; I had touched her golden lotuses before any husband. I felt a yearning to be closer to her than anyone; and it returned again with Bao Li, but even more powerfully. I kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her, until both of us were breathless and nearly mad with this quivering fever that I could see streaming from us in these most extraordinary, crimson waves. It pulsed and gnawed at us; she seemed near to weeping as I held her again."

"Did... Did you make love?" I feel perfectly silly, as if a child pleading for her mother to continue reading a romance. That throbbing, resounding rapture of our embrace continues to thunder through me; it rises again as she recounts this, as if I truly am reliving every instant with the immediate and wondrous familiarity of memory.

"Not then. We held one another until she left in silence." As sorrowful as that seems, Xi Go's features are alight with a truly radiant smile. "I kept a vigil, again, until she returned the following month; she told me, with almost a weary ritual, that she had come to best me again. That she would not rest until she had conquered the devil of the mountain." That seems to writhe with a sensual promise, as if she speaks not of the war waged by men. "And so, we clashed; she had become ever more powerful, and I knew that the command of the _Tao_ lay within her. She was an intuitive adept, nearly taking flight with the severest of breaths as she lunged and struck. No longer did she wield her father's blade, or any weapon; it was the beauteous dance of purest battle, a whirlwind of fists and her feet that her father had never allowed bound, so fearful was he of losing his only child.

"And when she tired, she fell to her knees again. We both were awash in sweat, for the last gasps of winter had died away and spring had begun to arise; I shed my armor, and she hers upon the grass. I could only lunge upon her at that moment; we exchanged so many playful and sweet kisses. She knew that I was not at fault for her father's death; I knew that she no longer hated me. And we kissed, and kissed; and I felt her heart thunder through me, and I knew that my heart had begun to beat again, at long last, when I felt her touch upon my breast.

"And we made love." I feel as if she speaks merely of what we have savored this evening, that her words are of merely an hour past, and not what may be centuries. "It was tender, and kind; sweet and lingering, as we always have been. And she left again, vowing to become more powerful, to finally defeat me. It was always difficult to wait that month; but it quickly became but weeks, and then merely days. Bao Li came again and again, as if I were opium; she craved me more and more, and I her. Eventually, we could not bear to be apart, and I abandoned my mountain fortress. We studied the _Tao_ together; we lived together, and I loved her more than anything in my life.

"As powerful as she became, however, there was... There was something that I could never teach her." Xi Go's countenance suddenly darkens, tears materializing in her dark eyes with an abrupt and jolting flare of emotion. "I could never teach her to become a true immortal; even with the most powerful elixirs swirling in her breast, even with the balancing of her cinnabar fields, there... There was something elusive. Perhaps not everyone can be.

"We lived our lives in happiness, however, even if I sometimes wept in secret and silence at the thought that I might lose her. Eventually, I learned to erase it from my mind, to embrace every day and every night as she truly deserved, with the full force of my love.

"But, she fell ill one day. She had already lived for fifty years in youth with me, but it was not long enough. Perhaps her path had already been chosen, but... But I could not merely accept that. Again, I vowed to relinquish my power to restore her to life, even if it would mean my own destruction; but, like her father, she refused. She would not hear of living her life without me, and I, at last, was willing to shoulder that burden for her.

"I could not bear her tears at the thought of living the rest of her life without me; no matter how selfish it seemed, I could endure her plea that I continue to live. But, we exacted a promise from the gods that we would always know one another; that I would suffer but for a few years until she would return to me. Perhaps in another body, with another mind, but with Bao Li's soul. With her last breath, she joined me in those prayers and petitions; I kissed her, and her eyes fell closed.

"And Bao Li died in my arms." Xi Go weeps now, as if she again is suffering this torment, the pain as raw and true as that day. "It was not the blackest night, as I had expected. It was in the morning, as the sun rose, as the flowers blossomed around us; her soul was gone, off to... To be returned, finally, to me.

"And you have come back to me, again and again. I have lived countless lives to be with you forever, to fulfill that promise that we will never be parted. To live our love again and again, for I have always feared that, if I were to be lost, you would linger upon this world, stripped forever of our union."

"_S-Shego_, I..." I sob in her arms, yearning to bury my face against her chest and scream with that agony that throbs and shrieks in my breast.

"You have come to me in many forms; all have been beautiful and glorious, as you are now. But, I... Before this, I have never needed to wait so very long. I do not know why you returned to life in Russia, but I am so grateful that you have arrived at last." My love struggles to control the furious tremor that shivers through her voice; I wish that she would not, that she would succumb to the pain that I too feel with such unbearable intensity.

"I'm so sorry." My voice is upraised in an anguished whimper. I feel as if I've tormented her, tortured her with my absence, even if I knew nothing of the intertwining of our fates. "I'm so sorry."

"Please, do not be, Kimberly. Please." An insistent shake of her head, even as crystalline beads of raw agony stream across her cheeks. "This waiting... It has not been done in vain. I... I have sought to discover how I would train you, to aid you; to, at long last, break this cycle of grief and loss."

"What do you mean?"

"For you to become immortal, Kimberly. For us never to be sundered; for you never to breathe a last breath, for you never to beg for me to cling to a life that loses all purpose the instant your eyes close, and you are lost to me."

"_Xiannu_." I gasp. That alien word that is now pregnant with such meaning.

"Yes, Kimberly." Xi Go, too, appears startled as I speak it. "_Xiannu_. An immortal; a true immortal, one that lies beyond even the reach of the gods. King Yen Lo Wang has no province over an immortal's soul; they live beyond the daily order of the Celestial Bureaucracy, beyond everything."

"I..."

"I am sorry. I know that you have... That you have not yet learned this for yourself. But, please, Kimberly. Please believe me. We will live forever together; I am certain of it. I... I cannot bear another lifetime without you."

"How will I?" I've long since abandoned any notions of the sacrilege, of the unchristian nature of such thoughts; that is beyond life and memory now, fading into the distant reaches of my existence as if merely a surreal and impossible dream. This, the life that Xi Go and I live and will live and have lived... This is my truth.

"With patience and struggle. It... It will be difficult; the trials will be extraordinary. But, I had learned it; and I have now learned from where my master had gleaned those techniques. We have tried and struggled so often, but I have now learned where we had failed."

"Who was I, _Shego_, in those past lives?" I interrupt, almost vacuously. I feel Bao Li, and so many other spirits, writhe with such a palpable intensity through my soul. I am those women; I am but one life, cruelly divided amongst so many spans.

"You were you." Xi Go seems nearly vexed by such a question.

"But, I... Who was I? What was I? Why do I feel so many different thoughts and sentiments, even through this one unbroken thread of lives?"

"I am sorry, Kimberly. You've asked me this so many times before, with so many voices, in so many tongues... But, always, you yearn to know; not with jealousy, for you cannot be jealous of yourself, but of a need to know what lives we have lived."

"Yes."

"You have always been a noblewoman; always of exquisite breeding and beauty. And always... Always surrounded by so much tragedy. Your life is full of so much pain, of loss and suffering; what should be yours is always taken from you at the cruelest instant. But, you always find me; I have been a maid, a nun, a priestess... Even a matchmaker. And even I do not know when and where we will meet until I experience an omen, another part of the pact."

"A matchmaker?"

"I... I have interfered with perhaps more than one wedding." A brief flicker of a wicked grin struggles through her sorrow. "We have always known, however, and always fallen in love. And it never is predictable; you sometimes despise me, as if you were Bao Li; sometimes, you kiss me, leap into my arms before I can even understand what has happened. Always, we find love as we never knew; always, I find myself deeper and deeper in love with you than I can remember.

"Always, Kimberly, I find you; and you find me again. I feel it awakening inside of you, blossoming like a lotus within your heart."

"I feel it, too, _Shego_... From- from the moment that my eyes fell upon you, I knew that you... You were extraordinary."

"Did you?" She seems ecstatic at that thought.

"Oh, yes. Yes." I repeat with a rapturous whisper, sniffling quietly amid those words. "I remember being frozen and entranced by you; I thought that you were a witch. That only a sorceress could possibly inspire such a peculiar and electric sensation. I was so embarrassed, though; I feared that you would think me completely daft for suddenly losing my grip upon my words."

"You were so beautiful; you are so beautiful." She reassures me.

"Am I? I... You tell me of these legendary beauties, of these Chinese goddesses that captivated you at the slightest glance. I feel as if I'm so hopelessly plain, that I'm not worthy of... Of that soul." Of Bao Li; of being a vessel for her beauty and presence.

"Kimberly." Xi Go appears truly angry for a moment; a flash of fury streaks through her eyes, before her lips claim mine in a fierce, powerful kiss. "Please, do not ever say that; do not ever even think that. You... You're a beauty beyond compare. Have you ever glanced at yourself in a mirror?"

"I see only a smaller and more girlish form of my mother." I explain, however furious she may become at that. "I see this tiny body... This... This unwomanly chest; these narrow hips... And then I glance at you, and I wonder how I could ever possibly compare."

"Bao Li was also lithe and delicate; she was everything that I am not. She was slender where I am full; she was fine and almost fragile where I fear I am crude. You are much as Bao Li had been; you are a true heir to her spirit. But, you are Kimberly; I love you and adore you as you.

"I did not fall in love with you, Kimberly, because I sensed that you carry her spirit. I have never fallen in love with those women, with you, because of that alone, however confusing that must sound. You... You must be predestined to captivate me, to render me breathless with a look alone. I was so happy to know that you admired me as I trained in the mornings." My cheeks flare a livid crimson at that, though I suppose that I should have known that she would notice me.

"Truly?" Perhaps it's hopelessly vain and conceited, but I yearn to hear that again.

"You, Kimberly, are the most beautiful woman on earth; in all the heavens." I thrill at that, as narcissistic as it may be.

"I wish that I were. You are, _Shego_." A gentle and sweetly sardonic roll of her enormous, glimmering eyes at that.

"You're just never agreeable, no matter when or how we meet. You always need to have the last word, to tell me of how much greater I am than you."

"Shouldn't I?"

"Kimberly..."

"You are, _Shego_. Or... Should- should I call you Go Xi?" A prickling welling of anxiety tenses in my breast as I finally speak those words with the tonal purity that she does, albeit in a voice entirely my own.

"K-Kimberly..." Xi Go appears to struggle for a moment, as if the past and present, and perhaps the future, are warring within those beauteous sloe pools. "I..."

"I can say your name at last." I feel an oddly melancholy and conflicted sense of triumph at that.

"My name is _Shego_, Kimberly." She concludes, at long last. "I cannot bear to live in the past; there is nothing there, because your soul is with me in the present."

"B-but-"

"Isn't the proper Russian pronunciation _Shego_, Kimberly?" Xi Go- her name to me still is Xi Go- teases.

"I... I suppose so." I conclude a bit meekly.

"Please. From-from the moment that I heard your beautiful voice embrace my name like a lover's arms, with that wonderful and glorious tone, I knew that I could never again bear to hear it any other way."

"Truly?" I'm awestruck by that. The past weeks have wracked me with a mounting mortification for being unable to even approach the mellifluous splendor of her pronunciation; that pure tonality that rings like divine poetry.

"Yes. Yes, Kimberly." A gentle and insistent kiss. "Yes."

"_Shego_. You... You'll always be my _Shego_."

"Always yours, Kimberly."

"And I'll always be your Kimberly."

"Yes." A soaring and resounding welling of bliss into her voice; it seems to rise as if an eagle, taking flight with a swollen rapture that floods me, that bathes me in its glorious and incomparable light.

"_Shego_?"

"Yes, Kimberly?"

"H-how did you know that Kimberly would be... Would be Bao Li?" It's gnawed at me since she mentioned that; an odd and niggling shred of comprehension in the very periphery of my mind that simply would not translate to any certain knowledge.

"Her name was Jin Bao Li." And it finally occurs to me. "Your names have always been so similar." A sudden and complete onset of silence as I nestle into her throat, raising a quiet and delighted coo from my eternal lover, finally again noticing the cool and slick ring of silver that encircles it; the jade pendant delicately brushes against my cheek.

"I love you, _Shego_." I finally speak again, and I realize that the pendant truly glimmers with a supernatural luster; that it produces an invisible light, an incandescent radiance that does not translate to any tangible glow.

"I love you, Kimberly." Xi Go seems to notice my sudden focus upon the pendant, and gently adjusts us; we ease upon our sides, clasped to one another, the weighty magnificence of her breasts even fuller as we mesh together. Her hand snakes between us to grasp the luminous stone, raising it before our eyes. It feels oddly hypnotic, that continual, beauteous glimmer that does not seep into a more tangible reality.

"What is that wondrous pendant, _Shego_?"

"This, Kimberly?" A curiously theatrical pause. "This is what will render you an immortal. It is a stone of the divine, from the creation of the heavens, much like the story that I had told you; a repository of power that eclipses anything in creation."

"Truly?" I shouldn't be astonished, and yet I am.

"Yes. I've... I've clung to this since Bao Li and I met; it was hers, a gift from her father. I've... I've selfishly clung to it for ages, wishing and praying that I could no longer feel the soul throbbing from it throughout those endless separations. She gave it to me in those final moments, whispering that I should keep it with me always until we were rejoined." With a graceful flourish, Xi Go lifts it from the elegant contours of her throat, suddenly clasping it between us; I find my hand fastening around hers, a sudden and bewildering electricity arcing in seething waves from that glorious stone.

"It is yours, Kimberly, my Love. It will always be yours; we will be united in its light for all eternity."


	9. Jade

The sun's caress upon my cheek is an extraordinary startlement. So accustomed have I become to the tender strains of Xi Go's voice, urging me into wakefulness as that molten incandescence is barely beginning to struggle across the horizon, that the warmth of that luminous flare welling to its fullest height is jarringly disorienting. My eyes jolt open with a start, a sudden spurt of awakening that seeks to force me to my feet; my mind whirls, and an almost agonizing sense of abandonment overtakes me at the sense that Xi Go may no longer be willing to train me.

And, yet, something restrains me; warm, supple, a silken and wondrous presence that invokes a momentous and blistering swell of memory that convulses me in a thrall of utter rapture. At once, I can remember, and it's wondrous beyond description; that dark, delirious, smoldering ecstasy achieves an almost impossible definition beneath the diffuse gleam of the sunlight, what seemed fantastic and impossible, a glorious fantasy that would never attain fruition, becoming the truth at daylight's return.

"Kimberly..." I never believed that I'd confront a drowsy Xi Go; her voice is vaguely slurred, a husky and quiet murmur that absolutely electrifies me with its dark sensuality. Her slim arms are laced intractably, powerfully, around my waist, and she's no intention of releasing me; I don't desire liberation.

"_Shego_." My reply emerges as a similarly hoarse and distorted whisper. I'm awestruck by how savagely even the slightest breath galls at my throat, much less any effort at speech. A single brittle sheet is drawn atop us, and yet I've the sense of being encased within a blissful oven; our mingled warmth, delicate and sweetly scented with the beauteous perfume of our embrace, engulfs us, silk sighing along velveteen skin and downy hair. I feel as though we've been inseparably intertwined; it's a challenge to even identify where Xi Go ends and I begin, and I've no desire to resolve it.

With a rapturous murmur, I settle again fully into her embrace. Xi Go tugs me nearer and nearer, crushing me again into the abundant fullness of her breast, and I've the sense of being a truly blessed stuffed bear, even as it seems as if every shred of breath is being wrung from my lungs. My mind has supplied merely the most furtive and fragile parodies of this in secret and longing moments for weeks; its true fulfillment is beyond anything that I could ever have envisioned, or even desired. My love; Xi Go, my lover, my lover; my true, eternal companion... She holds me, fastened to me as if a child, slim fingers digging gently into my suddenly inflamed skin.

We've made love; I know this with an intense, visceral certainty that transcends mere awareness. It tingles and coruscates through me, a supreme and electric delight that raises a swollen rapture into my soul and further stokes that molten heat throbbing in the pit of my stomach. I know now the name, the form, the sensual majesty, the essential truth of that most tangible expression of our adoration. It's not merely physical; it radiates, throbs and thunders through my heart and soul, and I feel as if we've attained a completion that defies time and life. I embrace a goddess; the divine in porcelain skin and raven locks that raises me to heights truly angelic.

"I love you." I finally speak again; those words are more precious and more glorious than anything, even beyond her almost agonizingly rapturous caress upon the urgent flame that begins to ripple and flare again. That virginal trepidation has nearly vanished, even as a flush floods through every inch of my skin; my fingers yearn for the creamy splendor of her flesh beneath my touch, for that most incomparable of embraces.

"I love you, Kimberly." Xi Go is awake; lovely, glistening and limpid pools gracefully reveal themselves, enormous lashes flickering in the morning light.

Words become impossible as her smile alights with a radiance beyond the insipid light of the sun. Dark lips, rouge smeared away into nearly nothingness by the relentless, passionate intensity of our kisses, part with a joy that strikes me with the force of heaven's thunder; I'm the source of that elation, that palpable jubilation that courses from her. I, Kimberly Dmitriovna Vozmozhnym, am her joy, her love.

I admire her in awestruck silence, unable to conjure so much as a whisper in response to a magnificence that renders me positively breathless. Finally, my beloved speaks, a gentle twinge of amusement in her sonorous voice.

"Kimberly? Did you sleep well, my Love?" I hadn't even realized that I'd slept; time is jarring in its progress. I can barely recall even the slightest twinge of drowsiness, simply tumbling into that infinite, unconscious void and arising again without even the faintest flicker of a dream.

"I... I didn't even know that I was asleep until I awoke, _Shego_." I curse this agonizing shyness, this timidity that manages to persevere despite the unparalleled intimacy of our embrace. I yearn to be as confident, as fearlessly passionate as she; to whisper beauteous poetry until she wilts, until she melts in my arms as I do within her own.

"I held you until I could no longer hold open my eyes." She explains with a tender, damp whisper that flutters through my senses as if a breath of the divine. "I didn't wish to sleep for an instant; I wanted only to admire you, to savor every second with you in my arms."

"I wish that I hadn't slept, either." A thoroughly pathetic and slightly mortified murmur.

"I'm glad that you did, Kimberly; I've never seen you slumber so soundly before. You even snored a bit, like a puppy." A savage flame riots through my cheeks at that, even as she serenades me with a wondrous giggle. "Don't be embarrassed; I'm sure that I do, as well." We lay upon our sides, Xi Go bracing her cheek upon the upraised cup of her palm; I do, as well, imitating her as well as I can manage, even as I'm certain that every limb will dissolve beneath her gaze. A wondrous curtain of ebony silk, downy and flawless despite our... Our lovemaking, embraces her glorious features; she's more beautiful than I could ever aspire to describe. Xi Go is more beautiful than yesterday; more all-consumingly sublime than even a moment ago.

"Still, I..." My stammer is pitiful, frightfully timid.

"Holding you was... Was a resurrection, Kimberly. Every day and every night, I've yearned to cradle you in my arms; to feel your warmth against me again. I've... I've prayed and prayed and pleaded and beseeched everything simply to hold you, even if I could do nothing but that. And I finally could; I finally can." We tumble into a blazing heap again as she bridges that infinitesimal gap to virtually tackle me; a gleeful, keening laugh wrenches itself from my lips as I find myself atop her, her powerful hands clasped upon the small of my back.

I feel ridiculously diminutive atop her, even as I love this sensation. The disparity of height is enormously pronounced, my toes gently ghosting against hers as my chin barely rises to her throat; her heart throbs through my body, a powerful and pulsating thunder that fills me with a bliss beyond compare. I flush at the voluptuous heat beneath me, supple and wondrous; an even softer silk, so delicate that it feels nearly liquid beneath my skin, lies at their center, gradually pebbling again at the searching caress of my hands along her arms. I kiss her, leaning to claim her lips; without hesitation, she devours my own.

And we embrace. Writhing, swaying, quiet gasps echoing between us as we periodically part with an intuitive, elegant grace; fragrant splendor caresses my lungs as I savor it in brief sips. We flow together in a wondrous dance of unparalleled tenderness and understanding; fingers interlace and legs delicately intertwine as it deepens with every kiss, every increasingly fierce and ravenous crush of lips. I must be mad, possessed by some lascivious spirit, and I cannot even begin to care; this passion that shivers and cascades through me demands indulgence, and I have no desire to refuse. My mind screams at me to claim her, to take her as we had again and again amid that supernatural light; the lust is no less spectacular beneath the seeping warmth of the sun.

"Kimberly!" A sweet and feminine mewl unfurls from my love's throat as my mouth fastens upon its lovely and swanlike perfection; flesh raw from my ravening passion glistens with a fine dampness as I, at long last, taste the incomparable magnificence of her skin. My fingers, emboldened by this heady and almost masculine compulsion, slither along flushed majesty; every tingling brush yields a new and exhilarating gasp, another beauteous and singular whimper. And, at last, I touch her again; a confidence previously unknown pulses through me with crimson urgency, palms fastening upon a bewildering fullness that no longer inspires anything but the utmost and unutterable pining.

"Kimberly!" A cry of utter astonishment; even yesterday, I fear that I would have been frozen by that, as if stricken by some sense of shame at my uncharacteristic forthrightness. Now, it further excites me; that yammering need thunders in my breast, sloshing with a liquid desperation through the deepest and secretest reaches of my body. That molten, wet flame rages within me, and the plushness beneath my grasping hands only further stokes it. "You're... You're touching me, and..." Xi Go appears positively awestruck, as well; I find myself virtually paralyzed with a certain reeling satisfaction when her eyes flutter closed, weighty lids clamping down as she's at once rigid, straining beneath my caress at the instant my reaching fingers discover the taut, pebbling peaks throbbing upon those beauteous swells.

"Kimberly!" A strangled scream; I'm oddly gratified, even as I yearn for her voice to soar to the heavens with those wondrous, poetic tributes to my touch. Her cries are mine, as mine are hers; I know this with a fierce, throbbing and feral possessiveness; we belong to one another, and only to one another. "D-don't stop, please..." A sublime plea, and I indulge her; eyes snap open again at the pinching pressure that I apply; experimentally, my mind clouded and bleary with longing, I roll them between slender fingers, the flesh exquisitely soft and pliable.

I can feel Xi Go's abdomen tense and strain; she quivers, fine and sleek muscularity rising into staggering relief as she bucks against me. The brush of forbidden lips briefly turns muscle to water, before I'm overcome by a savage and clamoring desperation that returns my strength with a lunatic intensity. Pliant, moist with some ambrosiac dew, we glide together; wracked with unrelenting, seismic tremors, we shiver and jolt against one another. My hands can no longer find purchase upon her feminine softness; they claim her own, balancing myself atop her as we interweave.

"_S-Shego_... M-my god..." I offer a prayer of incomparable delight to her, smiling with a mad luminosity as I offer myself completely to her kiss. That wondrous and cloying perfume overtakes us again, and I feel an absolutely torturous faintness; electricity scalds across every nerve, a panting heat swelling through me. I'm close, so desperately, achingly close again; I crave that, angling myself with anxious experimentation, striving to discover anything to intensify that already overwhelming sensation.

Xi Go, too, pivots and arches; we find ourselves clamped together, the supple and throbbing majesty of her legs fastened around my own. We strain, arch, and soar; that rapture is so familiar as to be warm and magnificent, and so utterly singular and unique to never, ever be anything but the most magical perfection. She silences my unashamed, unrestrained cries of the utmost wantonness with her lips; perhaps possessively, allowing solely her ears to savor them, boiling into her greedy mouth. She drinks them as avidly as I do her own; they resound through my senses, guiding me nearer and nearer to completion as if a distant, beckoning voice.

And we do at once; I feel her muscles throb and ripple, tensing and straining at the moment that blistering tide sweeps over me. I'm astounded, and elated; we've rocked and swayed, pivoting and grinding together, offering ourselves without reservation and restraint; sweet kisses awash with a honeyed magnificence, the tender caress of silken petals suddenly awash with a delicious dampness. We continue, convulsed with this wailing, whimpering delight, shuddering and throbbing, feeling that wave surge and break across us; ragged pants rend my lungs; my vision whirls, even as my sight remains locked unfailingly upon those deep, glorious pools in which I truly feel myself drowning. I can no longer draw breath amid this shivering, screaming delight, and yet I continue to rise ever further in her arms. Countless, shuddering explosions flare before my vision, and yet we continue until I'm certain that I will tumble into nothingness; I still cannot bear to halt. Only when an unendurable, spasmodic lightning storms through me at the slightest caress do I feel my hands cinching of their own volition upon her arms; my eyes beg for her to continue, even as my body screams for it to relent.

I kiss her, once again, as I collapse into her arms, every trace of strength fleeing in a draining, enervating torrent. The most delicious, molten heat wreathes my senses; it pulses and whirls around that forbidden glory, still braced against her own splendor. Her heartbeat serenades me, as do her quickened breaths; her pulse races in wondrous synchrony with my own. I had never envisioned that it could ever be so harsh, urgent, rippling with an irresistible haste; and yet it feels no less tender or sublimely gentle than those first, achingly shy caresses.

I shower her throat with kisses, damp and rapturous, folded into her as if the frailest creature in creation. I coo and sigh, offering her my adoration with every quiet whisper, every murmur of utter delight. I love Xi Go more and more with every touch, every union, every instant that our hearts throb in such wondrous harmony.

"I love you." Her lips, full and pliant, fasten gently upon my forehead at that; she curls around me, cocooning me in her glorious warmth. "I love you so much, _Shego_." I repeat, my voice so frail that it barely even registers within my drowsy and swirling senses.

"As I love you, My Kimberly." It gently susurrates against my skin, wringing a quiet giggle from me.

"_Shego_?"

"Mm?" A quiet and faintly distracted murmur, as if Xi Go is unable to focus upon anything but raining adoring kisses along my flushed skin and increasingly disheveled hair.

"Will you wake me like this every morning?" I'm more astounded than she is, flesh smoldering beneath her continued, tender caresses.

"You're so eager, my Love." A dark and wondrously sultry chuckle. "Every morning?"

"Y-yes." And every minute of every day; morning, afternoon, and evening, eternally consumed by this wondrous and shuddering ecstasy.

"Won't you be too terribly exhausted to train with me?" A levitous and wry whisper that sends a sudden and tortured groan welling into my throat.

"T-training? This morning?" I'm incredulous; I've a desire for nothing but to luxuriate in her embrace.

"Not this morning, of course." A minute distance opens to permit Xi Go to capture my gaze; her eyes shimmer and dance with a sublime intensity.

"It felt as if yesterday were our wedding night." A hot and slightly abashed whisper, as if I'm confessing some outlandish fantasy. Truly, I wish that it were; I cannot bear to envision a single day without my beloved.

"It was, Kimberly." My eyes goggle. "In essence. I... I know that we could never truly marry in a church; this culture is much too stifling to even envision that. But, we do not need the sanction of a church, do we? Of a cleric?"

"No." Harsh and husky, an indescribable joy soaring into my breast. "Y- you truly do want to spend your entire life with me?" A perfectly stupid question, and yet I crave her confirmation; to know that no part of yesterday was a mere fantasy.

"Oh, yes, Kimberly. Always and forever; there is nothing that I desire more." And I melt into her embrace, savoring the silent contentment that wells into me at that. "There is nothing else that I need in this life; as always, I long for nothing but your presence."

"Last night wasn't a dream?" Hearing of Bao Li, of our intertwined fates... Of the supernatural thread that binds us to one another, transcending life and time. Of that furious struggle for immortality, so that Xi Go need never live a single moment alone again.

"No. No, Kimberly; everything that we did, that we said, that you heard... Everything is true; that is our past, and our present, and our future." My lover seems virtually insecure as she speaks those words, as if she fears that I wish it merely were fantasy.

"I'm so glad." She relaxes at once, a lengthy fugitive breath erupting from her lungs with a furious sigh. "I'm so glad."

"My life was utter misery before I met you, _Shego_." I affirm, my words swallowed by the comforting warmth of her breast. "I... I was absolutely nothing; a little girl with no understanding of the world, and always questing after something. It was torment; I didn't even know what it was, and yet I knew that it was eluding me." Even with the gentle, naïve joy of Ariadne, or Maria and Valentina, I was never... Never truly complete. Even in those moments in Ariadne's arms, I know that I sought something greater, something more powerful; something that she could never have offered me.

"I've never felt anything like this completion in your embrace, _Shego_."

"Not even with Ariadne?" It feels as if a blazing lance pierces my breast as she speaks those words. Not with envy, or with spite, or hostility; merely a delicate curiosity that nonetheless engulfs me in a roiling aura of shame for having felt what seems a pathetic and awful infidelity.

"_S-Shego_-"

"It's all right, Kimberly." A supremely tender whisper that soothes my suddenly raw and agonized nerves. "I... I shouldn't have asked."

"Never with anyone, _Shego_. With Ariadne, I..." My voice dips to a feeble murmur. "I felt very close to her; so very close. But, I know now that it feels more what I had with Maria and Valentina than with you; a sisterhood that... That is poignant, and powerful, but without that passion that I do with you. I love you; I..." I finally conjure the courage to convey every desire, "I want to make love with you; I want to spend eternity in your arms. Before, I was afraid; Ariadne was close to me, and I thought that we might enjoy an eternity together, just wondering if I'd ever have the courage to close that distance.

"But, with you, I... I didn't want to wait; I didn't want to pause. I could actually embrace you as I'd craved so desperately; I could kiss you, _Shego_. It wasn't just living in some eternal world of childhood; I want to be a woman for you, to be forever at your side. To be a warrior with you, if I need to be; never to be afraid." It pours from me in a shuddering torrent, tears of shame and absolution gleaming in my eyes. "I want to be yours; I want always to feel this completion." Xi Go has no answer; I don't understand her silence until she begins to shift, lifting my gaze to hers with the tender and insistent pressure of her lengthy fingers beneath my chin.

She smiles; a radiant, rich warmth that shatters that sorrow and insecurity, that pulverizes the foundations of that suddenly brittle and pathetic shame.

"Kimberly, I love you. You didn't even know me in Russia; you knew nothing of me, of China. Did you ever suspect that you'd be traveling to Shanghai?"

"No." My eyes are glazed, my voice tiny and distant. I wish that I had; I wish that I'd allowed that certain faith to carry me through every day, to develop my strength and will to unite with Xi Go the very instant that my feet fell upon this alien soil that is now more familiar than anything.

"Then, why do you seem so ashamed?"

"Because, _Shego_, I... I feel your love now, and it's- it's the greatest ambrosia I could ever imagine. I feel as if I should always have known; that that spirit should always have pulsed through my breast. That such knowledge should never have eluded me."

"That's..." A brief flicker of Xi Go, my nurturing governess. "That's perfectly silly, Kimberly; it is."

"I was afraid that you wouldn't trust me because... Because you might think that I'd been untrue to you." It seems ludicrous now even to me, the notion that she would associate that oblivious and naïve attachment with the cruelty of a man such as Reinhardt's father.

"Please, Kimberly. Please, don't even think of something so ridiculous. I... I could never have faulted you for any such thing. Ariadne was your friend, wasn't she?"

"Yes." She must merely have been; there was never an instant that she sought to draw nearer to me, to embrace me as Xi Go had so avidly. "She was my best friend. I still adore her as my friend."

"And you should." She reassures me with every tender and nurturing caress, every delicate and languorous, level stroke of her fingertips across my shoulders. "We're in love, Kimberly; nothing can change that; we belong together. I... I would never feel jealousy for your past."

"It's just... I..." My cheeks flare with a sudden, angry intensity; a tension swells into my chest as another name occurs to me: Meilan.

"Meilan?" Her voice dips to a grave and harsh tone, her jaw tensing; I'm terrified that I've transgressed upon some sacred and forbidden territory. It is ridiculous even to have mentioned it; it was a time before I lived, and probably before Bao Li even had.

"I'm sorry. Please, forget that-"

"No." Her features soften again, and Xi Go strives to force an aching calm into her tone. "I'm sorry, Kimberly. I'm not angry with you. I promise you that."

"Then..."

"Then, why?" She interrupts, though I can hardly be upset. A deep, shuddering sigh follows, her arms folding me into her chest with a renewed strength. "I... I feel a terrible guilt; an unbearable sense of betrayal to you for even being- being upset by that still. It has been centuries."

"I don't understand."

"I cared so deeply for Meilan. I... I did not yet know of the words to describe it, aside from a faint yearning for what adults called 'bedroom business'; I desired her. Not... Not as I do you, as I did Bao Li and every incarnation of your soul, but I still longed for her. And I feel as if I should not have, even not knowing of the possibility of ever meeting you.

"She... I thought that she cared for me, as well, and that is the reason for which I raged with a demon's fury against those I felt to be like her, like her family. That is the reason for which I pillaged caravans and savaged mansions like these, divesting them of everything in my hate and grief. I suppose that I was very much a devil then."

"Centuries?" I'm astounded by that; perhaps no longer by the thought of her immortality, but of the perseverance of such emotions so powerfully throughout the ages.

"It was before the Manchu had even come; before the Qing dynasty, when the Han still called themselves the ruler of this land. I... As I had said, I was the accursed daughter of peasants; my family was despised for its meanness, for the lengths to which our relatives were forced to resort. Our friendship was something that her family looked down upon; they loathed me, and perhaps feared me, as so many others had."

"Why?"

"Why would they have feared me? I was born under a terrible omen; it was believed that I had been claimed by dark spirits of unvenerated ancestors, that I was a harbinger of unspeakable evil. And, yet, I was kept by my parents; perhaps they had thought of selling me in a time of scarcity." I revolt at that, at such a bestial and vile notion. I can hardly believe it, and yet I do not doubt her words. "Meeting Meilan, being allowed to actually exist in the presence of true nobility... That was a revelation, a liberation; I cared nothing for being separated from my parents, and from my brothers, who thought nothing of..." A brief, harsh intake of breath. "Of showing me terrible cruelty.

"With Meilan, I felt as if something must somehow have been different; that, perhaps with heaven's blessing, I had been ushered away from my suffering. I offered my thanks, my feeble tribute, to all of the gods that I could imagine, to the Buddha. I knew not of the _Tao_ then; nothing of Zhuangzi and Laozi, of the true powers that lay in this world, but I was nevertheless happy in my ignorance. I could not read; I could not even recognize my own name, Go Xi; I knew nothing but that I was finally away from a household that despised me, that denied me even the merest sustenance at a whim.

"That was why it was... Was so difficult to accept that Meilan suddenly cared nothing for me; perhaps it is that I could not accept that she never cared for me as I had her. I... I know that you probably do not wish to hear this." I'm torn; it's an ambivalent grief, a desire to learn everything that I can of my beloved, even as I revolt at the thought of her heart ever having held another.

"_Shego_, I..." A strained swallow, and I finally manage to conjure the will to speak with even the mildest clarity. "I do; I want to know everything about you, no matter how painful it may be. That... As you said, that was centuries ago."

"That was in what you would know as sixteen-twenty-five." A leaden and dreadful number, as if the thundering of a slab upon a tomb. It feels an eternity; it feels as if millennia would seem little greater. "And, since meeting Bao Li, it has withered into virtually nothing; only that pain truly remains."

"Why would she ever have hurt you?" And it occurs to me that I'm angry, venomously furious, at the thought of anyone injuring my Xi Go; and truly, giddily delighted that she is my Xi Go, that I can know that she is.

"She thought nothing of it. I was so certain that we had grown nearer when her feet were bound, when I held her as she wept; when I cared for her as if she were my own daughter, though I was actually a few months her junior. Perhaps it was that I thought of her as a wife, on some foolish and ignorant level; she was frail, and brittle, and so hopelessly delicate. She was naïve and unworldly; more so than I. I felt as if, perhaps, I should be her husband." Xi Go offers me a fragile and gentle smile. "But, those were only secret, childish little fancies. Even still, when I was the first to touch her golden lotuses, I thought that she would wish to be with me forever."

I don't understand; I'm not certain if I wish to understand. A feeble and bewildered grin creases my lips.

"I... I know that it is probably very difficult to understand for you, but it is a woman's feet, above all else, that made her a desirable wife; a dowry, of course, is important, but it was the feet of a goddess that were coveted. Fine, and tiny; a perfect lotus shape could attract even a prince's fancy." I'm astounded to behold a roiling crimson creep along her flesh; it stains her ample breasts, unfolding along the delicate contours of her collarbone. "I... I could not, of course; I could never aspire to that marriageable beauty." Which seems the most perfectly ludicrous thought in the history of mankind's follies.

"It is... It is intimate to touch that; it's solely the province of a husband; that right should be his alone, along... Along with his bride's chastity. That is why I felt as if Meilan desired me, longed for me to be with her, when she came to me one evening. She blazed with fever, tumbling into my humble bed, pleading for me to soothe her, to comfort her. And I did, as I had upon so many evenings. I... I restrained myself always; I held my thoughts close to me, never voicing anything but those constant reassurances that hers would be the most beautiful golden lotuses in the Middle Kingdom, that the pain would be worthwhile.

"She stilled, no longer crying out; but that fever endured, and she implored my touch. I caressed her skin, finally touching her there. We... We did nothing else; I did not even feel a twinge of desire to kiss her, but it was as if we had enjoyed some forbidden pleasure. She asked me to touch her there often, to take hold gently of her golden lotuses, to adore her, to lavish praise and flattery upon her. For those months, there was nothing else in our life; nothing but the occasional visits of her mother, who deplored me, and one of her aunts, who considered me a filthy thing beneath even her scorn.

"But, to dine together, to feel as if we were equals, as if... As if we were truly enjoying a life with one another; that was a fantasy to which I clung. I was desperate to be away from the daily reality of my life; it was so simple merely to believe that nothing would ever change, that we would be eternally bound together within the women's chambers, overlooking a fine garden, perfumed with jasmine." I've a sense of such complete empathy. While neither Ariadne nor I would have feared that grinding poverty that tormented Xi Go, both of us existed in a brittle and ephemeral fantasy world that we longed to live for eternity. Even those thoughts, that vague and niggling desire to close that final and torturous distance, seemed merely to further that.

"Every evening, she would implore my caress; and I would..." A sullen sigh, "I would indulge her with a relish that I now regret so enormously. I wish that I had merely acted as her friend and her servant, eternally preserving a seemly distance; I wish that I had never allowed myself to draw nearer to her, to feel anything but a companionship of service."

"W-why?" It seems such a cruel and fatalistic musing; that pain, that sense of resignation, are absolutely unbearable, and I cannot bear to confront that with such manifest grief in her quiet words. "You were friends. Shouldn't you have loved that? I... I do not understand what had happened with Maria and Valentina, but I never, for a single second, would have wished them to preserve some artificial distance."

"You would never have abandoned them." And a simmering anger becomes a flaring rage; it nearly frightens me, even as the warmth of her closeness soothes me again. "I... I know that I had told you that you should preserve distance and propriety, but- I had thought that this pain had left me, that it had withered into ash. It has not; perhaps only that fury remains, but it is so strong, Kimberly. Perhaps I had stifled everything with your absence, simply to survive each day; now, with the power of my love for you, that... That hate," Xi Go's poetic, beauteous voice is convulsed with an extraordinary savagery, "That hate has returned, as well."

"You... You hate her?" The notion fills me with almost an unaccountable terror; it raises a desperate and extraordinary fear that Maria's loathing is also so powerfully warranted, that I've committed some grave and unforgivable sin to warrant such fury.

"Yes." I wilt even in Xi Go's arms, suddenly so desperately and achingly insecure about everything that's transpired between Maria and me. "But... But, it is because she abandoned me; not because of some feud." And I feel myself smiling, rather ridiculously, at those words; perhaps Xi Go truly can read my thoughts. "I know that you're thinking of Maria, aren't you?"

"She despises me."

"Without any reason whatsoever. You are kind, and perhaps naïve..." A remark that's more than a bit perplexing. "Meilan- she, she should have known, and yet she did not care. She may have been thoughtless, but it does not justify casting me away; it does not warrant widening that distance, merely so that her newfound friends would not be," a straining tension stiffens the graceful curves of her jaw, "Inconvenienced by such an objectionable servant. Would you ever have thought of sending away Maria and Valentina if your friends had thought little of them?"

"They... They would not have been my friends. Ariadne... She loved to be with the whole of us; I always introduced Maria and Valentina as my sisters." As complete as the incredulity that greeted me would be at such a notion.

"It was not truly that we drifted apart; it was that, one day, introduced to so many fine ladies of beauty and elegance, united in their pursuit of husbands of wealth and power with the aid of the most distinguished matchmaker, she simply discarded me. I- I was... I was devastated; she recoiled at the slightest display of intimacy, of friendship, in their presence. She acted as if I were mad; that, despite the fact that her clothing sat upon my shoulders, I was simply another filthy and contemptible servant. She cast me away; she laughed at me." And I have no doubt of why Xi Go's hatred continues to burn so fiercely. "They mocked me, and ridiculed my commonness; I struggled to remain with them, to prove that I had absorbed her household's refinement, but it was to no avail.

"Finally, I learned that it was solely her parents' fear of aggravating a daughter that they treated as if a princess that protected me. I... I found myself cast away from any comfort, any kindness; I was at once deposited amongst the meanest servants, forced to struggle to protect myself from their depredations that had grown with their hatred at my special treatment." Xi Go averts her eyes from me at that, and I know that I do not ever wish to discover what misery she endured; the mere thought fills me with a directionless and blazing fury, a desire to scour away those long dead from earth or hell.

"I learned that my parents had sold me to Meilan's family; that, without any hope of marriage, I... I was only valuable to be sold as a little wife." My beloved's countenance blackens at that, a sickening and horrific dread so powerfully manifest, even as I know nothing of what she speaks.

"I..."

"I know that you do not understand, Kimberly. That- that is why I fled. I... I could suffer so much in silence, without complaint; but I would not endure that. I would rather have died than to..." Her voice breaks; a severe, shivering pitch swells through mellifluous splendor, as if a dying songbird. "Than to be her family's whore." Xi Go hisses; I can feel the fury unfolding from her with a deliberate, malevolent savagery, a murky and vermillion mist that truly terrifies and torments me with its aching enormity. I feel that rage echo thunderously within my own breast. "To be used by the men of the household for their pleasure whenever they wished.

"And, so, I fled. When... When her father tried to touch me, to force himself upon me, I struck out at him; I had taken a knife from the kitchen to protect myself from the other servants. I plunged it into his chest. Even then, I had no intention of taking his life, but I was terrified; I did not want to suffer that pain, that... That unbearable shame. I would sooner have killed everyone in that home; even Meilan. My- my affection had soured to a pain and anger that I still cannot believe. I ran; I walked with Buddhists, begging from the alms that they had begged. I strove to atone for what awful, pathetic evil had caused me such suffering in life. I... I did everything that I could to survive; I even was reduced to the life of a common thief. That is how I met my mentor, in fact."

"I'm so sorry, _Shego_." It's a feeble and ridiculous platitude; it feels moronic, as if offering a handkerchief to a man felled by a Maxim gun. But I do not know what to say; words elude me; they simply cannot convey the immensity of the grief and anger that I feel throbbing in tortured syncopation with her own.

"Do not be. The _Tao_ is not fate, but... It does direct one's life; it can influence the course of man's actions as assuredly as the flow of the tides. And, however deeply I despise and resent Meilan for her callousness, and her family for their cruelties, I know that I would never have met Bao Li if it were not for such suffering; I know that I would never have found the knowledge and serenity that has enlightened me. I would not hold you now in my arms, filled with the promise of a life together. I would be incomplete; I would have lived a short life as a simple servant girl, my horizons the wall of a household."

"I..." What am I to say? It's horrifically selfish, and yet I thrill at that glorious succession of trials that united us, that eternally bound us to one another with a thread of indestructible love. "I do not know what to say, _Shego_. I... It fills me with so much pain to hear this, and yet I would be nothing without you; I would not even desire life. Perhaps I would not even live; or, at the least, I would not be this Kimberly. I would not be filled with a spirit as wondrous and beautiful as that which is your eternal love."

"I think that you have said everything that I could ever wish to hear, my Love." And her smile returns. It's as if a thundering, roiling tempest has broken without preamble; raging sheets of nightmare, whorling darkness evaporating in an instant, vanishing from sight as though dispelled by an impossible magic. The gentle, almost tentative and shy parting of her wondrous, full lips shears through the darkness as though a blade of supernatural radiance, suddenly and majestically bathing my soul with a rapture that has been so achingly in abeyance since she began to speak of that distant nightmare.

"And that... That is why I know, without question and without doubt, without a single grain of uncertainty, that every trial was worthwhile; that every moment of pain, every hour beneath the torturing elements, every evening of struggling to ignore that cringing pain in my stomach that made a single grain of rice a feast... Everything was worthwhile. If that brought me to this moment, holding you in my arms, then I would willingly do so again without a moment's hesitation." And Xi Go, at long last, kisses me; that warmth, that lovely, delicate, insistent tenderness salves the anxiety that rippled through me in horrific, electric torrents; it dissolves the guilt and revulsion; the tortured sense that perhaps she may regret such unfathomable ordeals, or even resent me for being so hopelessly oblivious, for having experienced nothing but comfort and indulgence throughout my privileged and sheltered existence.

"I love you, _Shego_!" I virtually scream those words with a sudden and desperate need; that yearning swells furiously within my breast, and I cannot restrain them as we part from that glorious and lingering kiss.

"And I love you, My Kimberly. My Love."

"I'm... I'm glad that you told me this." Previously, I had not quite understood the shuddering and palpable waves of grief that streamed from her with those words; I had not realized the sheer depth of her ordeal.

"Are you, Kimberly? I- I do not know what came over me. I wish-"

"No." The sheer intensity of my voice startles me; even Xi Go seems to reel for a moment at that uncharacteristic assertiveness. "No, _Shego_. Please. I... I do wish to know everything about you; to understanding everything about you, about your life, about everything. I... I do feel foolish for my privileged life, for having only this blissful indulgence where yours was filled with so much suffering; and I do feel frightfully jealous at the thought that you might ever have felt even the slightest fraction of what you do with me with Meilan, but I love you.

"I love you so much that that sort of pain is trivial against feeling that much nearer to you; I want to be closer to you than I ever, ever have been. I wish that I could just melt and flow into you, so that there would never be any distance between us." I'm babbling; yesterday, I would have simply fled after such an outburst, but I remain steadfast now, securely folded in her arms. Yesterday, I knew nothing of the depth of this love; I understood nothing but the vaguest niggling sense of that desperate, pining heat; of that crushing and unremitting pressure within my breast that threatened to destroy me at every second that it was ignored, that I was forced to stifle it in her presence. Now, I embrace it, a molten and furious conviction throbbing through my veins; it deluges my mind, winding through every inch of my body, inundating me with a liquid strength that defies understanding.

"I love you, _Shego_. Nothing, nothing will ever separate us." Incredibly, I manage to unfasten one startled hand from my skin, guiding it to the glinting jade pendant that now sways with a pendulous warmth from my throat; I clasp it upon that blazing splendor, my own feebly struggling to encircle hers. "I promise you."

"Shouldn't I be the one to assure you of that, Kimberly?" Those needling words nevertheless emerge as a quivering whisper, a wondrous flush welling into her cheeks. I'm awestruck by the sheer resolve that's swollen within me; I cling to it, binding it, refusing to permit it to evaporate as if a fragile and ephemeral mist beneath the sun's seething heat.

"I love you; and I can be strong, as well, _Shego_. I... I know that I'm not an extraordinary warrior; I can still barely even control my breath. But, for you, I could do anything; I could wade through bullets to show you how deeply I love you."

And, joined with her, I have no doubt that it's true. I would suffer anything, endure anything, to be hers, for her to be mine; no obstacles exist between us any longer, and I realize that I would be willing to tear the moon and stars from the sky if it were a matter of lingering in her embrace for even a moment further. I know that it is selfish; I embrace it with a fervor that I could scarcely have envisaged in a previous life of restraint and control, of binding every emotion within my breast as if the slightest flicker of authentic joy or sorrow would shatter what bound me to this world. This love is selfish, and utterly selfless at once; a furious craving to remain enveloped within her arms, consumed so completely with her adoration, filled with that relentless and glorious supernatural heat that pulses and strains and soars with every instant that I feel her love.

"Kimberly, I..." A smile of the utmost elation, even as I reel with raw astonishment at the tears that seep in fine, glistening, gossamer seams along her cheeks; delicate strands of dew that attract the tenderest caress of my lips, brushing away every trace of what I could ever envision would be sorrow. I burn for her to experience nothing but joy in my presence, but the love that throbs within my breast with an urgent and quaking enormity. "Thank you." She finally concludes; I know, as she does, that no words, nothing so insipid and banal, of this common and worldly plane, could ever aspire to capture the immensity of the emotions that throb and thunder through our joined hearts.

"I can't believe that I feared being wed." Fine, glimmering beads of pure emotion trickle across my cheeks, as well; I make no effort to brush them away, simply savoring that curious, tingling heat as it wells from my unclouded eyes, spilling across skin alight with a luminous flush. I feel as if every sense is intertwined; that I experience every wondrous and riotously intense emotion from within her soul; it astounds me how she thrills at even the gentlest stroke of my fingertips across her creamy skin; I reel at the pure adoration that wells into her heart at the briefest glimpse of me; the sense that I truly am the most beautiful woman in existence, in all creation, that I become ever lovelier, ever dearer to her, with each incarnation. They're beyond merely vague and nebulous emotions, transcending simple sentiments; they throb with purpose, howl and wail with a preternatural force.

They defy language, pulsating in electric currents that fasten us together with enduring intensity.

"I... I can feel your thoughts, _Shego_." And, at that instant, as those words cascade along that wondrous nexus, I realize that they had not emerged from my lips; they're not spoken in my voice alone. It's a peculiar and magnificent stereophony, Xi Go and I together, communicating in tones of the heart; pitches and colors of musical splendor, a pure and melodious perfection without flaw and without anything but a supreme and sonorous majesty.

"As I can yours, Kimberly." It's a sublime and beautiful experience; our bodies and minds intertwined amid this seething bond. Her voice is again my own, as well; it's heard without the barriers of mere speech, flowing in graceful and mellifluous currents through our spirits.

"W-what is this?" It's startling, nevertheless; and yet I can feel that she already knows this, as I do. It's a disorienting duality to experience my emotions, and her reaction, in a flickering instant; I feel a swelling of fear and bewilderment, and yet am immediately soothed by her wondrous, firm reassurance.

"The jade." And I can at once perceive the unearthly aura that it exudes; it flares from within that glorious, lustrous stone, seeping through our intertwined fingers. My own senses are expanding, and yet I'm certain that this peculiar thrall of impossible understanding overtook us in the evening, as well; as I claimed her hand, as she whispered words of eternal bliss, as I felt those glorious silver links fastening around my throat. I'd feared that the weight would be extraordinary, that such destiny would be a strangling burden; it drifts with an impossible levity, enticing me ever skyward with its magnificent promise.

"The jade?"

"The stone of souls, of heaven; it fell in a period of extraordinary upheaval, as mandates fell and the divine became embroiled in turmoil as assuredly as the Middle Kingdom. It bears a transcendental power, as do others; but this is without peer, without equal, for it bears the mark of your spirit. It is bonded to you, to the lives that have been lived throughout the eternity for which you have lived; before Bao Li, and after, resounding through ages unfathomable. I did not yet even exist; I would not for millennia when it tumbled from heaven."

"And we hold it now?" It's impossibly extraordinary, and yet I assuredly do not doubt it. I can feel the power throbbing in most blissful resonance with our intertwined spirits.

"Yes, Kimberly. Yes, my Love. You will hold it within you, as I do my own."

"I... I don't understand." And, yet, I do; a peculiar presence whispers from within her, a power without form and substance that seems to speak with a mute voice of deafening enormity.

"Touch my heart, Kimberly." It's a jarring onset of unearthly silence as my love releases the jade; it tumbles again with a quiet listlessness to my breast as my hand falls away.

"_Shego_?" Why had she released me? Suddenly, my soul's voice no longer mingles and blends with hers; it's a torment no longer to be bound so completely with her.

"Please, Kimberly." She implores me with every part of her glorious being; eyes glimmer and lips exhort me. Without further pause, my fingers settle upon the full and pliant magnificence of her breast; I feel nothing but a glorious and entrancing warmth, that connection continuing to elude me.

"I don't understand."

"Touch my heart, Kimberly. Reach out; set your palm upon it, and feel its beat." I do without hesitation; my fingers gently sag, that blissful heat growing with every instant beneath the settling pressure of my palm. It begins to palpitate through me; powerful, regular, a spectacular bass that throbs through my own pulse, seeming to merge with and displace it. And I finally feel it again; it's jarring, as it had been originally, Xi Go's voice sloshing in a majestic torrent of liquid, sonorous gold through my spirit and body, even as her lips remain still.

"I feel it!" It's a peculiar stereo, rising from my throat and soul at once. "I do. W-what is that?"

"Another soul's stone, Kimberly. It... It lies within my heart." It doesn't seem as if that's merely figurative.

"What?"

"There is no true need for my heart to beat, Kimberly; my body is immortal. I have no need for breath, or for sustenance, and I lived for many, many years following my transcendence without those. This stone within my breast preserves me; it's a focus for that power, amplifying those divine elixirs with heaven's own magic. I did not understand what its significance had been before learning of its true nature; I simply assumed that it was a ritual, an arcane symbolism that my mentor inflicted upon me in his extraordinary cruelty.

"That... That was the last pain that I endured until I met Bao Li; my flesh could become stone; my body no longer perceived the lash of the cold, or the torment of the sun. I felt no hunger, and no thirst; I had no need for any of the trappings of this world." I still do not understand in the terms upon which my fragile and human mind continues to rely, even as the answers flood with such unfettered ease through a higher, ethereal realm of wisdom.

"What do you mean?" Even my utter mortification is conducted in shuddering, smoldering streams through this nexus; it feels even more powerful, more intense than the jade that droops from my throat.

"I had attained what I believed to be perfection; to rise amongst the immortals, to be worthy of the elixir of immortality: to be _Xian_, to live amongst them upon Penglai. Of course, I did not know the complete truth; that there was as much myth as truth in that, but it exhilarated me. I did not even realize that death is the transition to eternal life; that I had been taught by a man long-since dead." That sudden and ghastly awareness coruscates along that connection, an electric and unfathomable terror; her own dread, her awe and horror at that, seeming to resonate from centuries ago, become my own.

"_S-Shego_?"

"I am not a revenant, Kimberly; do not be afraid. I... It is not true death; the soul does not depart from the body, and King Yen Lo Wang does not hold purview over one's spirit, as I have said. It is a destruction of what is singularly human and mortal, however; the erasure of one's own name, one's true name, from the ledgers of death. There is then no time at which to die; destiny ceases to be, and time is placed in abeyance. It is one's own power that sustains life; one can decide what is to be done with that. That is why an immortal cannot surrender their strength to another if they wish to live; they do not even become mortal again, but rather erase themselves from life.

"If you have been noble and virtuous, then the Jade Emperor may have pity upon you, and you may be promoted to live as a god; but that is still no life, anchored to a gilded prison away from that which is known and loved. I have met gods and great demons; they are filled with a hollowness, a sadness of total purification of that which is mortal and sensuous. They may be wise with its passage, but they are profoundly empty.

"And that is why you have pleaded again and again with me to shoulder this pain, this burden that crushes me without your strength to support me."

"Please, do not ever leave me, _Shego_." And I beg again, with that supreme and complete selfishness that I cannot restrain. I yearn for her to be silent, never again to mention her passage, or my own; never to invoke again that blazing, unyielding anguish that scalds through the memory of ages past, that torments me with is flames of grief. "Please."

"I will not." A mild flicker of a smile parts her still lips, even as I wish that it were possible for those horrific remembrances to be erased as surely as the tumbling of a shooting star from the night sky. "I promise you that, Kimberly. But, now, you will never leave me." And I feel the sudden and crushing weight of the jade; the stone seems leaden, its sleek edges grinding into my flesh with the mildest pressure of her slim fingertips upon it, guiding its luminous form over my breast.

"I promise you." I vow. I do so without hesitation, without fear, without anything but a fierce and stern, stolid conviction, even as a silent shadow of terror leaps and soars in the periphery of my mind. I do not fear that death; I am convulsed with a desperate worry over my extraordinary frailty, a weakness that may simply destroy me. I am terrified, truly, utterly overcome with fear, at the thought that I may lack the strength to perfect myself as Xi Go had.

"It torments me, Kimberly." I know that she can sense my thoughts, my relentlessly gnawing worries. "Not the thought that you will lack the strength, but the merest notion of ever being forced to inflict the slightest grain of pain upon you. It... I will tell you now that it will not be without suffering and ordeal."

"I know." I have no doubt of that. Even what seemed languid exercise for Xi Go has been utter torment.

"I am afraid that you do not, Kimberly." A kiss that sparks and seethes with a bewildering electricity. It feels as if every sensation is amplified with this incomparable union, rising to a rapturous peak as every flicker of sense is reflected again and again between us, gathering and swelling to extremes that virtually overpower me with even the faintest caress. "But, I will be with you; always, I will be with you. I will swallow your pain."

"I..." A sudden shock of agony lances through my breast, before it vanishes as her features contort with a tortured wince; her hand has pressed the stone to my chest again.

"Do you feel that, Kimberly?" Xi Go remains startlingly unstrained, even as her physical body convulses with a swelling torture that begins to bleed into me; even that briefest kiss of such supernatural agony is a pain beyond anything that I could ever have felt. She releases the jade, and it relaxes. "That... That is the power of the soul's stone; it does not purge, but it does purify and strengthen. It... It will be pain more exquisite than anything you have felt. You will die, for but the briefest of moments; your heart will no longer beat, and you will have no need for breath." Which feels itself so very, hauntingly familiar. "It will pierce your breast, and you will draw it into your heart, amid the cinnabar fields."

"What?"

"B-beneath my touch. I... I revolt at being forced to injure you, but it is the only way, and I would trust no one but myself with such a task. It must be driven into your heart, where it will lie opposite my own; I will join with you, those stones in eternal union. Then, you will be perfected; every moment will be as it is now, and we will never fear for death. We will want for nothing, Kimberly." That inner voice pulses and quakes with a palpable excitement; I feel my own chest swelling with a joy that crests above even that surging tide of absolute terror.

"At long last, that terrible cycle, that awful and intractable fate, will be broken. Please, do not think it selfishness." As if I could; my heart continues to cry out with an awful and ceaseless suffering since having heard of those endless and cruel separations, and I feel that agony of parting with a pain more urgent and real than anything I have ever endured.

"I could never, _Shego_. I- I have been the one to be selfish, to beg of you again and again to survive without me." It is not in my voice alone that those words are spoken; Bao Li and countless other spirits cry out with me, soothing her, falling upon her fragile heart as if a truly tangible caress. "I've been terrified since hearing that... That we might someday be parted. I cannot bear the thought of it, and I would suffer any anguish to be with you. I am ready for any ordeal; I can tolerate any torture if I need no longer feel this pain."

I cannot even begin to capture the rippling grief and agony that blazes within my breast. It feels more powerful, more brutally intense, than any other loss; it is the sense of perennial separation; it tinges even this soaring and meteoric rapture with a hidden core of fear and trepidation, a terror that I may no longer see my beloved again with the fickle turn of fate, even as she carries forth with a tragic and sorrowful strength.

"Then, we will never be separated. We will struggle each and every day for that; our lessons will be for the future, and not of the past." Irresistibly, with an unyielding strength, she wrenches my palm from her breast, even as it struggles to maintain its unfaltering grasp. I wish to cry out with the sudden loss of that intimate perfection, but she silences me with a wondrous immersion in another sensual splendor, her lips fastening upon mine.

I simply tumble into her arms, surrendering to that kiss with a passion stoked with an almost unfathomable desperation. I am terrified; I'm now afraid that every breath, every second, is a widening of some nightmare gap of mortality between us, and that I may not perfect myself with sufficient swiftness; that I may very well never attain that majesty that she has, that unwavering and extraordinary control and discipline.

I lose myself in her warmth; it's a narcotic haze, swirling around me, fierce and savage waves of pure ecstasy dashing away even the most yammeringly awful fears. She seems to accentuate the utter foolishness of my worries with every tender brush of that pliant and yielding magnificence; the tears that have flooded without cessation from my eyes mingle with her splendor, saline sorrow subsumed by a welter of soothing sweetness. I'm permeated by an utter calm, an almost divine visitor that pours across my body, flooding through my veins with a captivating grace and drowning my mind in its gentle tranquility.

I know that it is her kiss, the twining of her arms around me, that submerges me within this fathomless ocean of comfort, and I embrace it. I surrender to her; to her touch, delicately and avidly exploring my skin; to the growing pressure of her lips, that terrible sorrow having ignited some extraordinary desperation to purge its very memory with the molten and overpowering enormity of the love that courses between us. Beneath her caress, I feel no fear, no doubt, no insecurity; time, gloriously, has become meaningless again. The drift of the sun, the passage of its gilded rays across our skin, is as trivial as sparrows' tears; no hunger is greater than the gentle ferocity of this craving for her.

"You're a sorceress." That whisper ghosts with a languorous and teasing frivolity from between my lips, her own brushing upon mine with the lovely, quirking smile that forms, so slight is the distance parting us. The soft peak of her nose brushes with an almost ticklish tenderness against my own, and she captures my mouth again. I love this, this aching gentleness that refuses to be hurried by anything. Upon awakening this morning, still, those thoughts that the blazing kiss of the sunlight might yet dispel this passion as if a lingering dream tormented me; now, I have no doubts of the truth, the wondrous and blissful reality, of our union.

"I am, my Love." Her lovely murmur throbs as if a tangible presence through the suddenly charged air, seething across my skin; I feel truly alight with an unbearable electricity, every inch of my body tingling with a fervent longing. "And you will be, as well." Another kiss, gentle and lingering; another whispering caress across my skin, unhurried and with the utmost, tantalizing languor.

"Will I?" It's a quiet and vacant murmur, the words of virtually no substance or meaning to me, even as I speak them with a singular reverence.

"Oh, yes." Damp and pregnant with promise, her voice sears through me. I feel as if I'm upon the cusp of madness with this tortured patience, and yet I thrill with every new and furious spurt of longing that shudders through my body. She teases me, luring my thoughts further and further away from any suggestion of that grief; and I love her, adore her, worship her. I can ponder nothing but the persistent, agonizing distance of her lips following each brief, tantalizing kiss.

"You've bewitched me, _Shego_." A statement of the blatantly obvious as I surrender wholly to this irresistible sensual magnificence. The sun has risen to its apex, now, a diffuse and unearthly gleam radiating through our chambers; it reminds some distant and gauzy fringe of my mind that it's noon, that we should long since have begun our lessons.

If only I had realized that this would be our lesson, that vacuous shred of lingering consciousness muses, even as my body convulses with a sudden and furious spurt of raw rapture. Xi Go's slim fingers play across my breast; that lustrous and sleek, chilled chain has begun to scald me, and she inflicts the most delicious torture upon me with that uncanny, supernatural heat. It seethes upon my breasts with a chill beyond description; my eyes goggle to mad and outlandish proportions at the subtlest graze upon those pert and pebbling buds.

"W-what is that?"

"The stone isn't only for supernatural arcana, my Love." Fine, prickling teeth have fastened upon an earlobe; she soothes every delicate nip in turn with the brief and sublime slash of her tongue, slick and blissfully warm.

"I..." It's not, it would seem; a peculiar sensation pulses with a furious syncopation within me, throbbing in explosive counterpoint with every brush against those delicate and fragile peaks.

"What are you doing?"

"Can't you feel it, Kimberly? Flooding through you, into your very soul? Everywhere?" I do; those minute grazes, teasing and delicious, confront an echo of the most thunderous enormity. My eyes are agape; my sight whirls with a glorious and wanton, shimmering distortion, as if I've peered for endless eternities into the blistering glower of the sun.

"Yes!" A strangled scream, barely suppressed amid the sudden stillness of everything but that unearthly caress. It feels as if innumerable ethereal fingers tease and prickle along every inch of my body, caressing and touching me from within, pleasuring me with a furious parody of the stone's graceful drift across my seething and hypersensitive skin. "I..." I had never envisioned that the beauteous jade pendant that swayed with such easy elegance from her throat, settling upon the ample swell of her breasts in a manner that irresistibly lured my blushing and anxious gaze, would now offer me such foreign and bewildering ecstasy.

I quake and convulse, gripped with such shattering abruptness by that fierce and unyielding embrace of impossible warmth. It begins within the pit of my stomach; a stirring of that familiar heat that swells to a boil without preamble, without even bothering with the exquisite torture of its growth beneath my lover's touch. The unique texture of her hands, the slender and elegant, tapered magnificence of her fingers... I can feel them so powerfully, so intensely, even as one clasps the small of my back, bracing me against a faintness that threatens to collapse me into a trembling heap; the other continues to brush that wondrous jade with such an aching, deceptive tenderness across my quaking body, that resonance that rips through me positively overwhelming.

"I... I feel your touch, your fingers... I..." They part within me, stroking and plunging, a glorious and poetic grace that coaxes desperate, keening whimpers from my lips with every impossible and otherworldly caress. She devours my cries, a grin of utter triumph blooming across her dark lips.

"I know, Kimberly... It's magic." It truly is; it's a sorcery transcending anything that my fearful and naïve imagination could ever have considered in what I now know must merely be a distant oblivion. That life seems almost impossibly dark, little more than a narrow shadow cast upon the vast and unbroken light of memory that blazes through ages.

"I'm..." I surrender without a further word; every scream vanishes mutely into her craving, greedy throat, pliant splendor seeming to milk those wailing cries, urging them toward a soaring crescendo that leaves me drooping and enervated atop her. "I-I..." Words elude me; merely a gasping and inarticulate series of pants offer the vaguest parody of speech.

"I love you." The spell seems complete with that tender murmur, fluttering through my senses with the delicate grace of a butterfly's wings. I can feel nothing but an indescribable delight, a joy that purges every shred of sorrow and regret from my mind; an aching magnificence that seems to blaze away the tears that have lingered within eyes that widen with an exquisite clarity.

"I love you, _Shego_." She hasn't erased my memory, but she may as well have with the molten torrent of joy that consumes me in thrall like a man awash in opium. "That- that was absolutely incredible." I still am consumed by a girlish flush, a giggle of virginal purity even with that most glorious and intimate of caresses. I can't envision that sense of forbidden splendor ever vanishing, of a joy that lifts me to unimaginable heights with its innocent perfection.

"I felt it, as well." I finally realize that I'd been virtually blind throughout that; my sight was of an unearthly awareness, my true vision shrouded by eyelids that feel consumed with an absolutely staggering weight. Xi Go is virtually crimson; her cheeks blaze, a delicate sheen glimmering upon her forehead; her hair is radiant with a lustrous dampness. "With... With such intensity."

"Truly?" I don't doubt it for a moment, but I yearn to again hear her voice, husky and ragged with deep and fierce pants that she continues to draw with a manic intensity.

"Yes, Kimberly." Xi Go wrings a quiet and startled squeak from me as her slim fingers lace around my wrist, dragging my hand beneath the rumpled and entangled silk that barely now shrouds anything but that dark magnificence beneath our hips. Eyes widen to immense, glazed pools as she guides my touch to that wondrous, pliant heat; it's awash with a weeping wetness, liquid majesty seeping from her with a lurid wantonness. I'm entranced, unable to resist a fervent and sudden need that seizes me to touch her; to ease a finger, and another, inside of her, a thoroughly wicked smile creasing my drawn lips at the sheer enormity to which those glorious midnight oceans broaden.

"Kimberly!" How can I restrain myself when confronted with that incomparable serenade? Delicate, swift strokes wrench low and almost guilty whimpers from her; it's as if she's restraining herself to focus wholly upon me, and a desperate craving to shatter that selfish selflessness flares through me. Her delight is mine, and mine hers; I cannot even begin to conceive of anything more sublime than the knowledge that I raise her to those heights transcendent.

"_Shego_... I love you so much. I want to touch you; I need to touch you. I'm a part of you, and you are me; every..." A harsh swallow as she blazes scarlet, clenching her jaws in a struggle to stifle what I know to be irresistible, furious screams. "Every moment that I... I give you pleasure," I'm in awe that I can even speak those words, however brittle and tremulous my voice, "I feel it doubly. Please." I'm begging for her to succumb to that insistent, gnawing rapture, to collapse into release.

"Kimberly!" A muted and straining whimper, and I fasten my lips upon her own, finally liberating her; she screams. At last, at long last, she is unrestrained, and she howls with a heavenly splendor her ecstasy at my touch. Her eyes widen so enormously that I'm certain they'll burst from her beauteous features; she's convulsed with a wrenching, shuddering delight that sends her wondrous petals folding around me as if wracked with winter's sudden onset. I'm astounded by the crushing pressure of that sublime heat, smoldering as if an ocean of liquid flame; it pulses and floods around my questing fingers, trickling across my hand, as she attains that zenith again, and again, and again, until every shuddering convulsion seems to have flowed into a single, shattering stream. "I..." Xi Go parts from me with a desperate effort, teeth fastening upon her full and bruised lips, before her quaking hands seize my own; I groan with a disappointment unimaginable as she implores me to halt, even as I know, wondrously, how overpowering and insufferable those heights of bliss can be.

"Kimberly." My lover is stunned; I am, as well, by that unaccountable and most glorious of thralls that overtook me. I felt possessed, devoured by a desire more powerful than any other: to pleasure her, to sate her, to overwhelm her with my touch. A few blazing strands link my fingertips with her beauteous lips; I admire them as I raise them with a sudden and irrepressible inquisitiveness before my gaze. They glitter with a jeweled veneer, scented with a glorious and focused perfume that renders me absolutely dazed with a renewed welter of lust.

"_Shego_." I could claim her, devour her, until I collapse from exhaustion, until I succumb to hunger. "_Shego_..." That mantra, that prayer, emerges as a yearning and desperate whimper; it continues to throb with such a furious intensity between my thighs, refusing to abate, even as I feel as if I could tolerate no further touch without tumbling into convulsions.

"Kimberly." Slender digits twine delicately around my palm; my fingers remain upraised, those fine and lovely beads gleaming tantalizingly before my sight. She seems to intuit what I desire even before I surrender to that need, that ambrosia swallowed with a greedy gluttony; I'm overwhelmed. It's more extraordinary that I could have envisioned, that even that wondrously sweet, passionate perfume could have suggested. It's cloying in its majesty; the essence of overripe cherries, plump and bursting, swelling with a forbidden magnificence as they bulge and tumble from pale branches.

"_Shego_, my god..." She is my goddess; I care for nothing but her, worship nothing but her, now. I lave at my fingers, her eyes widening again to impossibly wondrous proportions; they alight with a glistening, riveted lust, fixated madly upon the stroke and flicker of my tongue. I struggle to claim every droplet, a quiet groan of utter disappointment, of desolation, welling from within me at the epiphany that nothing but the heat of my own inflamed skin remains. "You're a goddess."

"Kimberly, I..." An overpowering yearning to devour every droplet of that from her, to lave and kiss her there, to coax every trace that my searching tongue can manage, is suddenly so fiercely manifest; even through a mist of utter, furious timidity, it blazes and throbs, commanding every shred of attention that I can muster amid this narcotic haze.

"You're so sweet..." Is this the essence of an immortal? "You are ambrosia, _Shego_." And I am at once crushed to her, clamped to her pliant and yielding breasts with a pressure that threatens to force every trace of breath from my lungs.

"Kimberly, you... You have no idea of the effect you have upon me, do you?" I've a reasonable inkling, but my heart soars further and further at those words, at the sultry, smoldering tone that seems to rend every sense with its intensity.

I need to devour her. It's a peculiar and overwhelming compulsion; she's not yet even shown me that, guided me with her quiet and tender patience, but the image of that wondrous, dark allure parted beneath my tongue, freely exploring that most wondrous of forbidden delights amid the serenade of her cries, is irresistibly glorious.

"I..."

"I don't believe you ever could. J-just seeing that, hearing that, I was certain that my heart would burst." I'm certain that my own will. "You become more beautiful with every moment. Do you realize that?"

"I hope so." I wish to curse that pathetic shyness, that vestige of my hopeless timidity, even as I celebrate how rapturously she responds to it.

"You are. You're absolutely extraordinary."

"Am I?"

"Don't force me to repeat myself, my Love, as intensely as I adore those words." A low and sensual chuckle that resounds through her chest and throat at once.

"I just wish that I could be as beautiful as you." I am always, eternally, in awe of her; I know this with an iron certainty that transcends merely this life's thoughts. Those women... I... That peculiar duality of the collective and the individual are as rigidly united in the totality of her perfection as we are of my love for her.

Xi Go, for once, doesn't seek to argue, as intensely as I can feel her strain with the urge to affirm how much more wondrous I am. She merely holds me, enfolding me in her arms with a warmth that dissolves every lingering trace of tension that's endured from that peculiar and slightly frightful union that nevertheless was of a bliss unrivaled. In a blink, it's as if time has jolted forward again with its increasingly ubiquitous, manic ferocity; a gathering twilight casts deep, dappled shafts of gold through my sight, and yet nothing compares with the all-enveloping splendor of Xi Go's arms.

She's held me, I realize, as I slept; unyieldingly, her embrace has supported me, cradled upon her lap, my arms fastened around her neck as if an infant; her lovely, sleek legs lie beneath me, unshifting, that molten heat radiating through every reach of my being. Remarkably, I have not dreamt; not a single thought, the minutest flicker of those familiar and now distant fantasies, unfurled through my bleary brain.

"Good evening." My lover speaks that as if welcoming the morning, with a quiet tenderness that ignites a radiant smile upon my lips. I feel as if every shred of energy that such raging, emotional rapture devoured from me has returned in a sluicing torrent, flooding through every reach of my body.

"Good evening?"

"It's already twilight, my Love." Craning my neck, I finally claim her gaze with my own. Her eyes, wondrous, deep ebon glory more luminous than the sun that slants at a furious angle into our chambers. It blazes every surface with a molten crimson glare, save for Xi Go's skin; it captures not even the subtlest suggestion of that blistering reflection, preserving its alabaster purity beneath such a ferocious onslaught.

"Is it?"

"Yes." A gentle giggle. "You were exhausted. Aren't I the old woman?"

"Hah." An exaggerated laugh that gnaws at my parched throat; a furious flush that's probably a reasonable approximation of the molten twilight swells across my skin at the sudden and decidedly unladylike gurgle that wrings itself from my stomach. "Oh, god..."

"What is it?"

"Well, I... I'm desperately hungry." It occurs to me with a peculiar spontaneity, as if some improbable epiphany; I realize that my appetite has been in extraordinary abeyance for a day, save for a brief sip of tea. That nightmare swell of famishment is absolutely unbelievable; it's as if my stomach has simply begun to dissolve itself without bothering with nourishment, a crippling ache wracking my abdomen. "Ow."

"Are you?" Xi Go appears more than slightly bemused; a question begins to form upon my lips before I recall with a jarring suddenness that she's an immortal, and that anything so banal as nourishment is merely a matter of a whim.

"I wasn't before this." Which is a bit perplexing in and of itself.

"I know, my Love; I nourished you." The resurgence of those sweetly, maddeningly cryptic answers, though I cannot muster the slightest shred of frustration with the utterly beatific grin that she brandishes.

"What?"

"I nourished you; in my arms, if I so decide, you need nothing but air to sustain yourself. Rather, you nourished yourself; I simply aided you in guiding your fields into an ephemeral alignment."

"Why didn't you do that originally?" It's suddenly a bit vexing; I've the sense that those agonizing exercises could have been avoided if she'd merely been so forthright.

"Do what?" A perfectly guileless query, her tone levitous as she quirks an exaggeratedly inquisitive eyebrow.

"Why... Why didn't you aid me in aligning my fields, in transforming me?"

"Because it would not be permanent, as I'd said. I... Perhaps it was selfish," a mild flush creeps along Xi Go's cheeks, "But I couldn't bear the notion of parting for the sake of something so trivial as food. Unfortunately, you still haven't actually eaten for... Is it a day, now?" My stomach's mortifying and vociferous complaint confirms that.

"God, I'm sorry. That's... So very, very embarrassing."

"I think that it's adorable." A mischievous grin plays across my love's features. "It's one of the benefits of hunger, isn't it? You've always been so insecure about your appetite."

"I..." I suppose that she would naturally know that. Mother has hounded me unremittingly about the hunger that swells within me, admonishing me about properly ladylike portions, to be certain that I don't gain weight and become fat. It's only recently that I've actually sated myself to the slightest extent, even as I nevertheless, with the utmost anxiety, restrained myself in Xi Go's presence. I suppose that those diminutive dishes of those glorious culinary garnets are more understandable now, however; it was possible for her to simply relish the wondrous flavor, not even bothering with so trivial and visceral a notion as satiety.

"Was I?" I finally answer, as if that will divert me from my grumbling belly.

"Oh, yes. Even Bao Li, the fierce warrior, was as vain and anxious as a princess about that; she would nearly allow herself to pass out from hunger, simply so that she would not appall me with her appetite, or so she believed. I find it beautiful; the play of your dainty fingers upon your _Kuae Tsy, _enjoying every morsel as if you were starving." Another quiet and rapturously unrestrained giggle that raises a ferocious, blazing surge of crimson across every inch of my skin.

"I..."

"I love every part of you, Kimberly. That includes an appetite of a warrior." Another teasing laugh that inspires a desperate yearning to dissolve into the silk that swathes us.

"_Shego_..." It's a genuine whine, brittle and childish; I'm pleading for her to halt, even as I bask in that wondrously tender and unfettered intimacy.

"All right, all right. Still, you are a warrior, my Kimberly. Do you know this?"

"A warrior?"

"You always have been; you have always fought with a ferocity that far outstrips my own." I'm torn between a wide-eyed awe and a scoffing bark of laughter at that. Perhaps I can finally begin to imitate her grace and sublime coordination with that exotic martial dance, perhaps I briefly channeled some transcendental and distant strength with that first, peculiar awakening, but I'm as much a warrior as a piglet is a navigator.

"_Shego_, I-"

"You have protected me so many times, Kimberly." There is no longer any teasing levity in her voice. Her glorious eyes gleam with a stern and fervent intensity, forcing the incredulous smile from my lips. "Please. I do not wish to seem so very grave, but I want you to know this. While... While you may not have been _Xiannu_ for..." The words are too agonizing to speak, and I cannot bear to hear them. "While you may not have achieved that completely, your strength, ultimately, has always been much, much greater than mine. While I may have dispatched bands of men, you could rout armies with a single sweep of your power."

"I could?" I'm in awe of Bao Li, of those fierce goddesses whose collective spirit I've now inherited. I have never, of my own accord, thrown even a single punch.

"Yes." Her smile returns with a wondrous, luminous splendor. "Now, let us dine." She accentuates that with a gentle squeeze of her slender hands upon the sliver of my waist.

"W-what?" I'd forgotten entirely about my appetite, already enraptured by such a notion. "I'd like to hear more about this."

"And as wondrously vain as you always have been..." My love does not yet release me, but I can feel the prodding force of her radiant gaze. "I will tell you more over supper."


	10. Gift

"I can't do this!" My protest is swallowed by the shuddering darkness that engulfs us; merely the quietest rustle of the frailest creature's paws offers a reply to that muted complaint. The band twined beneath my brow is drenched with perspiration that sluices in ghastly, torturous streams from my forehead; it feels as if every droplet of water that my body has absorbed in the whole of its seventeen years is geysering forth, vaulting in awful, massive beads that scour across hypersensitive skin.

"Yes, you can." A strangled cry wrings itself from my throat at the sudden, bruising impact to the rear of my knee, sending me tumbling into the loamy soil. There is no pain, but I cannot sense any restraint from my instructor, either; if anything, her dark and sultry tone is alight with a certain visceral delight.

"_Shego_, please!" Something damp squelches beneath my palms as I struggle to hoist myself from amidst the tangled riot of foliage that I visualize as a glorious and beauteous emerald, flaring around me in full and raging color that presently eludes my blinded eyes. It's not a simple blindfold; it's a stout series of silken sheets, cinched around my head with an almost excruciating strain. A pressure knot restrains my hair; it throbs against my skull, even as I'm intensely relieved that it's not being slathered with the grimy awfulness that's smearing every other surface of my body.

"Kimberly, I cannot. I'm sorry." No further blows, for the moment. I don't blame her; she urged me to be patient, not to insist upon accelerating our training. But, since being overcome by that nightmare sense of mortality, that urgent and agonizing fear of some looming separation, I could barely think of anything else; and even the minutest instants for which we have been apart have been more terrifying than I can possibly articulate.

"I- I know." I'm no longer breathless, however. Those words emerge with the ease of an ocean breeze, cool and unhurried from my lungs. They cool the simmering sweat that rolls in fat clots across my lips; tears of a deep and aching frustration seep from my shrouded eyes. "I can continue."

"Are you certain?" My love's voice is a tentative murmur, rife with a palpable concern for me; she doesn't wish to torture me with this, to hurry me toward a balance and completion with such bestial intensity. She is my love; I feel a rippling tide of raw energy surge through my aching limbs at that glorious epiphany, that secret and majestic truth that is the most sublime wisdom that I have ever claimed.

"Yes!" I still myself, anticipating another strike; my breath ceases to be; my pulse no longer throbs; my heart is briefly in abeyance as a stern will coalesces within my chest. It's a peculiar and unearthly presence; a calm that unfolds as if the most graceful of lotuses, petals blossoming across every reach of my being. It feels as if my soul itself is extending tendrils of aching sensitivity; even a swallow's breath roars as though a hurricane, the minutest whisper of motion bearing a thundering voice of warning.

Of its own volition, an arm- my arm, I barely register- jolts forth from that whirling, nebulous mass of sensation; a shuddering impact; a quiet crackle of bone upon bone; the brief, gasping intake of breath. Another, and another; again and again, any sense of time unaccountably suspended, we clash. I remain still, unyielding in my anchorage upon squelching dirt that now seems as robust as lead fastened around my ankles. I realize that Xi Go is restraining herself; the cadence of those thundering blows, however bewildering in its celerity, is hardly a fraction of her swiftness; its strength is but a minute shard of her true power.

Nevertheless, however, I feel myself buckling despite this furious struggle to remain upright. The dank chill of the soil is a misery that I yearn to avoid; the slim peak of her peculiar shoe brushes against the fringe of my knee as a lurching pivot barely forces me away from her strike.

"Excellent!" My love's tone quavers not in the slightest; there is no strain, no suggestion of difficulty, as if this is simply than the rudimentary dance that I've finally managed to conquer. I've endured morning upon morning of that unrelenting agony, the arduous cruelty of breathless, lung-blistering struggle, reining in that irrepressible, natural compulsion for the glorious perfumed air that boils forth from the garden; that now wreathes me without notice; that barely even teases my lungs as I constrain every impulse that seems almost frightfully foreign amid this focused trance. "Excellent, Kimberly!"

Unlike Xi Go, however, I am unable to speak; hers is an inner breath when concentrated with such effortless intensity. I may, even ephemerally, be immune to the tyranny of something so banal as human limitations, but I've barely even begun to creep to within the merest gleam of the aura of power that she exudes. Another blow, and another; they're narrowly avoided. I've begun to adjust to this rhythm, however; a savage fencing of arms and legs, parrying and thrusting, barely escaping what I'm certain would be an anguish to crush through even this insulating shield of liquid stone. It writhes along my skin; grazing strikes that would have sent electric torment lunging through me are consumed with an almost greedy relish.

A vague, niggling sense of some susurrating torture is beginning to permeate my body; it courses along the roots and petals of that ethereal flower, channeled with a subdued cruelty through those supernatural conduits. It feels as if it lies deeper than any muscle or vein; it ripples through my very bones, seeming to pulsate from the depths of my soul. It's a power transcendent, and yet its grip has become absolutely agonizing; it can barely be sustained for any length of time until it seems as if my flesh is beginning to peel away, flaying me with a sudden, screaming suffering that raises a warbling shriek from my throat.

Tears now boil from my eyes; clenching them closed accomplishes nothing, my sight of unfettered clarity amid this blinding torture. No longer can I sense anything but that urgent, yammering anguish, and yet I persevere; the image of Bao Li's resilience, her strength and power, and those of the other warriors whose soul I have inherited sustains me. I know that I scream; that my lips work in silent torment as breathless lungs strain to unleash those cries of hellish grief.

"Kimberly?" Xi Go no longer strikes at me; my fist plunges listlessly into an outstretched palm, bearing with it the lingering vestiges of my strength. Knees become water; fingers submerge themselves with a miserable, sullen squelch into the dank earth. A low, keening wail rises from my parched and protesting throat as my chest, despite my most fervent struggles, fills with a savage breath of rending failure and abject disappointment. "Kimberly!" Stone crumbles from my fragile skin; I, at once, am overcome with a shivering disgust at the gruesome, clammy embrace of the accumulated soil, at the icy caress of some distant and fragrant breeze fetid with a confirmation of my ineptitude.

"I'm so sorry." I weep; I sob and whimper and shiver, even as Xi Go's delicate and firm hands soothe the pain that flares into such shattering relief through my body. "I'm so sorry." I wish to rise again, to resume our training, even as my muscles refuse to respond; they will not obey me, revolting as if an abused mount; if they could, I suspect that they would abandon me, vaulting from beneath my skin.

"For what, Kimberly? For what?" Despite the horrendous accretions of filth, Xi Go swaddles me in the wondrous supernatural warmth of her arms; they lace around my waist, her palms folding upon my heart. Even despite this cringing misery, I feel a stirring of unparalleled bliss begin to blossom from within me, a shy and delighted flush swelling along my mud-spattered cheeks. Finally, my love has permitted me to launder my costume; unfortunately, I'm the one responsible for doing so, grinding away every trace of accumulated grime and sweat from the brittle fabric within a washtub. Mother, assuredly, would rage at that; my spine continues to protest at the contortions that demands, doubled over as Xi Go, with ostentatious luxury, simply brushes away a few errant point of soil.

"For failing you." The shrieking sorrow has fled beneath her soothing caress, fine fingertips gliding with a languorous grace across my collarbone.

"Failing? Kimberly, you're remarkable; I felt your alignment for an extraordinary length of time. Even I could not achieve that with my master after such little experience."

"I... I should already be perfect, shouldn't I?" That emerges as a slightly mortified whisper. I've finally begun to adjust again to the novelty of true air; the garden is perfumed with a glorious majesty of mingling floral scents, innumerable exotic flora contributing their own sublime ingredient to a whirling melange of aromas. Xi Go, however, overpowers the whole of them with her distinctive and wholly unique splendor; I nestle against her, surrendering completely and unhesitatingly to her embrace.

"Kimberly..." I'm certain that she shakes her head with that characteristic exasperation; I've long since become accustomed to the gentle, swaying pivot, lustrous ebony rustling against her cheeks and that stout tail lashing quietly across her shoulders. "You are perfect, but you cannot expect to be a master of these techniques within several weeks. You've improved so immensely, but..." Xi Go enjoys the benefit of centuries of experience and training, of focusing herself for endless spans; of being a true immortal.

"_Shego_..." A drowsy and pathetic murmur creeps from my lips; they taste of mingled sweat and tears, miserably saline beneath the brief and desultory lash of my tongue. "Am I doing well? Please, don't deceive me."

"Yes. Oh, yes, Kimberly." That glorious embrace intensifies, her grasp suddenly fiercer than my fragile body can endure. "Yes. Do not worry; this is merely your fourth day of training in the garden."

"Why are we here, anyway?" The answer, admittedly, is obvious; but that vacuous question lunges from me with a vaguely petulant whine.

"Is it not beautiful? Does it not focus your energies and your attention?" It does; and it shrouds us from the unremitting lash of the sun, never mind the servants' prying eyes. I have scarcely seen my family, now, for a number of weeks; my parents have hardly acknowledged my existence, beyond instructing us to greet Reinhardt for our 'courtship'. He and Jacqueline have yet to depart; for what reason, I have no notion, but they are arriving again today.

"Yes." I admit, even as the soil envelops my knees with a shivering chill. "It does; I love it. I wish that I weren't blindfolded, though."

"I'm sorry, Kimberly." Xi Go's glorious, damp whisper rustles against my ear, raising a sudden longing for the hypersensitive focus of this peculiar blindness to remain; it's a struggle to restrain the groan of frustration that its abrupt vanishment inspires. Even the dappled, diffuse shadow of the garden seems the blazing glower of the sun with the tentative parting of my eyes; lashes beat a furious, tortured tattoo across my cheeks as I struggle to adjust, squinting them to mere slits.

A gilded, tingling, tear-streaked halo gradually begins to recede, lifting the bristling foliage that envelops us into firmer definition; it finally resolves itself in its darkly sensuous splendor. Drooping, bladed leaves bow with deference toward us; lacerating peaks offer delicate, fluttering kisses across my cheeks and shoulders, even as the voluptuous blooms of ferns and brittle flowers, flourishing with almost supernatural courage, litter the murkier depths with radiant sprays of life. Squirrels and other tiny, fragile creatures, comfortable with our composed presence, lunge and bound with irrepressible energy through the endless emerald majesty; quiet chitters and soaring, quailing cries form a beauteous chorus in serenade.

"I love this." I fear to speak, and yet I cannot restrain that marveling whisper. I adore the garden; in Xi Go's presence, it throbs and pulses with a life beyond life. It's as if the plants themselves cry out with voices of their own; tiny and fragile fauna wail with a vigorous passion that belies this tiny sanctuary's isolation. It's as if we lie in the center of the vastest jungle; even the soil is redolent with a pungent, cool scent of infinite life, seeming to shudder with an energy flowing from hidden nature surrounding us.

"As do I. I... I was the one to guide your father to this home, actually." A confession that does not entirely astonish me. We do not disturb the life that flees with a savage panic at the approach of other humans; I can feel a certain energy writhe in wondrous resonance with us, as though we're merely another extension of this untamed natural perfection.

"Truly?"

"Yes, Kimberly." A brief, ticklish rustle as Xi Go inhales deeply the scent of my hair; it's become horrendously entangled, despite the taut tail, gradually fastening around itself even as it unravels into an unruly mass.

"H-hey!" A giggle bursts from my straining jaws, followed by another, and another, as I tremble with the sheer, shivering sensation of it. "Don't do that."

"Why, my Love?" A quiet and distracted murmur, her full and incomparably pliant lips brushing across my nape; a savage, seething bolt of raw electricity streams through me at that, and I virtually faint in her unyielding grasp.

"It's... It's dirty; I haven't even bathed today. I'm drenched with sweat." I am a bit mortified. Despite my condition, regardless of my strengthening control, I'm yet unable to restrain that.

"You're so sweet, Kimberly." A deep and sensual chuckle, resonating through her chest and blossoming in a rippling wave through my body. "Truly." Another kiss, and another, and another, along my nape, tracing across my throat. A furious, shivering tremor overtakes me; I arch into her, drooping against Xi Go's willowy form.

"_S-Shego_, that... That feels so incredible." It churns and blazes within me; that craving is absolutely overpowering, drenching damp petals with a further torrent of wondrous dew. Xi Go and I have made love every morning, draped in an all-encompassing haze of irrepressible and irresistible passion; questing fingers, the liquid delight of greedy and alluring lips; a quaking, thundering explosion of raw rapture that renders it impossible to muster the slightest concern for everything.

The sun caresses our skin, bathed in a blissful and feminine sweat, as it eases along that well-worn path toward its zenith; we tumble deeper and deeper into that rapturous void, cries swallowed by searching mouths; flesh, glistening and sanguine, strains and dimples beneath questing hands. I'm astonished that I've even the merest shred of strength following such a thrall of overpowering ecstasy, and yet I can no longer voice even the slightest complaint when she ushers me with a knowing smile and a gentle laugh from the swaddling silk sheets.

This costume eternally rests beside our bed... Our bed; Xi Go has long since abandoned her own chambers, beside me as that momentous, blazing sphere begins its aching, halting, ever more tentative collapse beneath the voluptuous abundance of the garden. We embrace, bathed in scalding shades of vermillion, still clasped in each other's arms as violet becomes ebon virtually as gloriously dark and sublime as my beloved's locks.

"Mmm... Kimberly..." A brief, teasing flicker of her tongue against my ear.

"_Shego_!" Could we here, convulsed by this sudden and feral yearning? "I..."

"Be patient, my Love." A thoroughly dreadful and regretful murmur.

"Why?" How can I restrain this temeritous, quailing cry? I truly burn for her; every inch of my skin alights with a furious, frenetic need, regardless of how decidedly unladylike my present state. I care nothing for raw, untamed nature engulfing us; it seems to further intensify my desire, as if that visceral and feral, animal vigor has further inflamed my craving for Xi Go.

"Kimberly..." My lover seems upon the cusp of succumbing, as well, until she parts from me.

"_Shego_!" A true, mad, howling wail tears itself from my throat amidst furious intakes of breath.

"Don't you remember, my Love?" I do; that memory is a cruel epiphany, a shaft of the utmost, seething evil lancing through this blissful haze of lust.

"I do." The words seep from my straining jaw, slithering through clenched teeth. "I do. This is so stupid."

"It is." Xi Go eases before me; her slender form towers above me, casting a shadow that writhes with a stunning luminosity. My love's smile is vast, radiant; a few errant locks whisper playfully across her creamy cheeks. The sight assuredly does not diminish this mad wantonness. It would seem as if I'm finally offering her a challenge; the flawless, almost starched, crispness of her costume has become rumpled, a few streaks of soil caked upon the bleached, bone-white perfection of the fabric; it droops from her shoulders, tresses a tantalizing black upon majestic ivory skin.

"_Shego_..." I extend my hand, a perfectly neutral smile flitting across my lips; she grasps it without preamble, without question, raising her Princess from the leeching muck. Even I'm astonished as I apply the whole of my resurgent reservoir of strength, sending her pitching into it beside me with an abortive squeal.

"Kimberly!" She's now drenched with it as terribly as I am; even an immortal's clothing, I suppose, isn't quite impervious.

"You're so gorgeous." And she is; dark soil clings in a stout clod to one cheek, wondrous ebon silk dappled with it.

"I... I can't believe you." She's not angry; perhaps she never could be. At once, an almost unaccountable welling of laughter rises from us; it soars through the still garden, resounding with thundering enormity amid the foliage. I feel as if I'll faint from it, those manic giggles claiming every shred of breath. That image torments me; Xi Go, passionate and powerful; Xi Go, the warrior; Xi Go, my alluring governess; Xi Go, spackled with mud.

"You're a naughty girl, Kimberly." A quirking of her lips, and a massive clot of it fastens to my cheek; we're now perfectly paired. She kisses me; the cool and earthy scent of the soil can barely aspire to compete with that blissful and feminine aroma that rises from her, however, or even the harsh and crisp fragrance of womanly sweat. "A very naughty girl."

"Will you punish me?" Spoken with outrageous cheek, I'm certain. These past weeks have seen an extraordinary swelling of my confidence with her; perhaps true courage. I feel liberated, as if every caress, every kiss, every beauteous embrace has shattered shackles that have bound my body, mind, and heart with a lancing finality.

"Punish you?" That's pregnant with a blazing promise. However unyieldingly tender that wondrous and blistering passion, its expression has not consistently been; I continue to bear the raw streaks of her nails along my skin; the wondrous, throbbing delight of her furious kisses, the nipping pressure of her teeth as she marked me. The savage, searing rapture of her hands upon my skin has managed to meld that soaring ecstasy with a truly delicious pain that I could never have believed.

"Won't you take me across your knee, governess?" I've discovered Xi Go's own wondrous vulnerabilities; that she absolutely dissolves at a sidelong gaze, batting my eyelids with the utmost, almost childish innocence.

"You're... Not being fair to me, either, Kimberly." Breathy, harsh, hoarse, she virtually snarls; it's at these moments that her transcendental control seems to lapse, nails becoming lacerating talons that pierce into anything, often with the most delirious tenderness. At present, the soil parts beneath the slim blades, a quiet squelch signaling their unmoderated passage.

"I know." I could never have envisaged offering her a smile of such unfettered confidence, such easy and wicked lasciviousness. We've consumed one another, however, throughout these preceding weeks; flesh blending with flesh; souls intertwining with the intensity of ages; every embrace deferred has been claimed with a fury of unbearable yearning and need. I feel myself again, for the first time; this sense of perennial unease, of terror, of utter frailty, of being merely Kimberly Dmitriovna has lapsed.

"I can't believe how you've changed, my Love." Xi Go seems to sense my thoughts; then again, I've no doubt that she can read them with the utmost facility, as if every nebulous musing is the most intelligible, bold print flickering through my gaze. With the aid of the pendant, and her own jade, we've bonded again and again; her mudras expand that unearthly aura of connection, bridging even extraordinary distances.

"Have I?" A slightly bemused grin; it's been such a natural and wondrous transition that I've barely perceived it, even as I know from her reactions, and my sense of utter incredulity at behavior that seems unaccountably ordinary, that I no longer am the agonizingly timid wretch that disembarked the _Titan_. My mind returns for a moment to my pondering of the _Odyssey_; perhaps Xi Go is my Circe, though I've no intention of ever abandoning her side. She is my Penelope, as well.

"Extraordinarily, but not in the slightest; who you are, Kimberly, my Beloved... That has not changed in the remotest sense." A deft blink of motion; her celerity remains astonishing, but I can actually perceive now those intermediary pulses of movement, her lithe and sinuous body unfolding with an effortless grace. Xi Go extends her hand to me, and I barely resist the compulsion to tug her anew into the suctioning loam.

Lovely, slender fingers of the utmost warmth fasten around me, and I, at long last, rise from that leeching mass; it clings in dense, weighty clots to my clothing, even as Xi Go, much to my vexation, is virtually unaffected. I'd rather delighted in the image of my beloved beside me, grumbling quiet obscenities as she scoured away every kernel of that wretched matter from her costume. The soil has already begun to evaporate; it tumbles from her in a withered and anhydrous mist.

"_Shego_?"

"Mm?" An inquisitive cock of her head; the muck has now vanished from her cheek, as well, creamy and incomparable perfection utterly untarnished with its disappearance.

"You're not dirty any longer." It seems as much a query as a statement of irritating fact.

"Of course not, my Love." Her signature quirking smile and cryptic answer.

"Why?" Remain patient, Kimberly; she probably won't docilely accept being plunged into the soil again.

"Magic, my Beloved." My blood boils at the rapturously teasing tone with which she speaks that, levitous and utterly casual, as if I should simply harness my own limitless reservoir; not with rage, but with a sense of aching frustration that's begun to blend with a vexation of another sort entirely. Xi Go hasn't bothered to correct her clothing's glorious dishevelment, and that wondrously sensual provocation melds with the expansive swath of creamy skin now bared to the prickling breeze.

"I..." A harsh swallow rends my suddenly, agonizingly dry throat; I feel as if I've reverted to that tortured virginity, albeit with a singularly vivid and ferociously raw, urgent knowledge of what delight her milky splendor bears for me. "I can't believe how gorgeous you are." I find myself soaring to paradise at the flicker of the pale pink grandeur of her tongue across her dark lips; a beauteous contrast that invokes at once the image of its play across an infinitely lovelier delight.

"Hardly so beautiful as My Kimberly." We're beginning to weave through the dense and seemingly impenetrable foliage of the garden; stout and momentous thickets of riotous, verdant majesty that part accommodatingly for us, as if vested with a humanity of their own. Plush and sleek leaves rustle gently across my skin; the caress is blissful, soothing that flaring heat and aching discomfort of the sheathing layer of soil; even the slim twigs that perennially threaten to snag upon my disheveled hair seem to recede, merely the subtlest ghost of a caress upon my cheek.

"I love you, _Shego_." I remain desperately fastened to her; the supernatural, susurrating, shadow-dappled surreality of the garden nevertheless inspires a certain tingling twinge of fear. The warmth of her hand is truly wondrous, in any event, and I bask in that electrifying magnificence; her emotions spill through me, a concentrated tidal torrent of raw bliss that yields the most perfectly silly grin that refuses to depart my lips.

"I love you." She never fails to return that with an eagerness that sends my heart soaring in a spiraling rapture above paradise itself. Xi Go's gaze remains bound to mine, craning her willowy neck to focus wholly upon me; she negotiates the garden intuitively, easing with but the quietest sigh of bamboo against her clothing. Perhaps the garden recognizes and fears her power; perhaps it merely is awe of it; perhaps it permits her to control all as assuredly as she had the intractable muck that I can now anticipate cleansing from my own clothing.

"Did you truly guide father to this home?" Speaking his name is virtually an alien experience; it seems nearly meaningless, as if simply another regal title attached to a wholly faceless apparition that occasionally haunts me with cringing aggravations.

"I did, Kimberly. Your father sought out a governess, and I had long since rendered myself available for the task; the omens guided me to you." It's a glorious confluence of fate; a supernatural majesty that permits her to grasp that beauteous gossamer strand binding our souls, weaving it into a true future for our lives together.

"How did you know?"

"I simply did." Even Xi Go seems bewildered by the phenomenon. "The omens... They- they are as unclear as a turbid pond churned by a great fish, and yet without ambiguity; they deliver to me an extraordinary certainty, a series of images and thoughts that seem to trickle from the ether itself that I must obey. They are incomprehensible, but invariably correct; flickers of sights, of names, glimpses of the past and future. They led me to your father." If nothing else, I am grateful for that; however pathetically I have become alienated from my family, they are the reason for which Xi Go and I have, at long last, been reunited.

"That's..." I have no words that capture how utterly singular a notion that is; the thought of Xi Go and Bao Li having invoked the power of the heavens, of gods and spirits, to conduct me throughout these lives; to preserve their union. "That's extraordinary. How did you meet my father?"

"It is not an entirely exhilarating tale." A vaguely laconic murmur as we finally begin to approach the astounding, gloriously rounded enormity of the pagoda. Xi Go and I have often entered its darkened sanctuary to meditate, to sit in a silence at once strained with fervent, tortured concentration and unearthly calm. Beneath the converging shadows of the Eight Immortals, cast despite the complete and all-encompassing blackness that swathes the chamber, lit by the transcendental and ethereal light of the spirit with which it resonates in vibrant jade light, we have focused for hours that expand into days and contract into seconds; eternities in instants, and flickers of time spanning ages.

"Will you tell me? I..." I've a vague sense of shame at any lingering attachment to my family; the thought of caring for anyone but Xi Go, needing anyone but Xi Go, seems anathema. Their ignorance and intolerance are mortifying, as well; never mind the notion of their assuredly recoiling with a cruel and spiteful revulsion at our relationship, indifferent to our love and eternal devotion.

"Yes, Kimberly?" She obviously perceives my unease as we drift into the clearing carved at respectful distance around the pagoda.

"I don't feel as if I've known anything about my father since he left." I finally conclude; we pause beside the soaring temple, my gaze drifting toward its darkened foyer. I, at long last, understand why even the most fervently concerted struggle to peer into its depths met with nothing but a blinding, eye-misting vexation; light cannot permeate that which is illuminated solely by a nexus with the divine. The original architect of the temple was not a merchant; he was a student of the _Tao_, an adept of awe-inspiring power that had succeeded in visiting Penglai, from whose residents he begged the indulgence of crafting statuary imbued with their essence. His ordeals were extraordinary, but, finally, he persuaded them; it is said that he slew demons and devastated invading hordes to capture this honor.

Even he, however, had not become a complete _Xian_; the temple land was acquired by the prosperous Shanghai merchant upon his death and the end of his family lineage. It was never possible to demolish the temple, despite the official patronage of Buddhism; death and misfortune greeted anyone that dared venture into its depths with ill intentions; tools rusted and decayed the instant their freshly-honed blades caressed the majestic stone; explosives dissolved into feeble heaps of damp powder. I know now that a presence lies within the pagoda; Xi Go and I pay our tributes to Han Zhen Zhi upon entering.

"Your father, Kimberly?"

"Yes." A sullen murmur of indescribable aggravation. I realize that I've begun to hate my father. I never cared for my mother; despite the almost aching tenderness and familiarity with which she approached Maria and Valentina, I was never the recipient of anything but unremitting criticism and denigration. I was never to her satisfaction; my rapport with my tutors, my languages at Smolniy, Ariadne... Even my body was not what she desired.

"Well, we were introduced through... A mutual friend." A vague, quirking smile that seems rather peculiar.

"A mutual friend?"

"He... Well, I do not know if 'he' is quite appropriate; most ghosts retain a sense of whom they were in life, however." I greet that with a goggling incredulity that's hardly so powerfully abject as it would have been weeks ago.

"A ghost?"

"A spirit. He is very loyal; indeed, it is his obligation to be. He was fulfilling his services to me." Another thoroughly matter of fact mention of something utterly beyond the domain of the ordinary.

"His services? Can... Can a ghost be a retainer?"

"If he has done something in life to warrant it." A reply that I can only consider to be hopelessly mordant.

"Who is he?"

"The ghost? Chao Guo; a petty thief who stole a very, very valuable artifact that would better have been left alone." Xi Go and I finally begin our trek toward our... Toward our quarters; I feel an overpowering urge to slap myself whenever that glorious notion graces my thoughts, merely to be certain, utterly and completely certain, that it's true. Rain-drenched soil gives way to lovely, weathered stone, more ancient than the home itself, once the courtyard of a vast temple complex that had erupted around the pagoda. It's presently darkened with a fine dampness; streaks of mud smear its otherwise wondrously unblemished surface in my wake, even as Xi Go's diligent and deft footsteps yield not even the slightest trace of that unsightly matter.

"What was it?"

"A dagger from one of Qin _Shi Huangdi_'s bodyguards; one of his immortal bodyguards, in fact. It would seem as if a more brazen looter had pilfered it from about his tomb. The dagger, of course, is cursed; destined to capture the spirits of anyone into whom it enters contact, so fearful was the terrible Qin _Shi Huangdi_ of his enemies' retribution. I liberated poor Chao Guo from its grip in exchange for his services."

"When was that?" It's extraordinary to realize that Emperor Qin, the bestial and mad ruler of China's unification, was a practitioner of our very techniques; that the _Tao_, in its great and ineffable sweep, can comprise both the transcendent and the demonic.

"I believe that it was... Late in the nineteenth century." By mutual agreement, Xi Go no longer refers to any of my past lives; the notion of our continual parting is unbearable even without the attachment of dates and names to that torturous tradition. Nevertheless, I begin to ponder whether she and I had done so together, or if that... That was a time of her aching torment, in which she would be so desperately lonely as to even liberate a petty thief from a curse in exchange for companionship.

"And, so, what of Chao Guo now?"

"Once he masqueraded as a suitably dignified, westernized gentleman, I liberated him from his services. He was never that useful, in any event." A quiet snicker, as though Chao Guo had been retained as a supernatural joke.

"It sounds a bit cruel." I muse; Xi Go immediately turns, a stricken and solemn smile supplanting one of lunging ebullience. "I..."

"No, you're right, Kimberly. That did sound a bit cruel; I don't wish for you to think ill of me. Chao Guo was a very entertaining companion; he was merely not that valuable as a servant, lacking any knowledge of any usefulness."

"Oh." An understanding nod as we finally ease into the wilted, perennial darkness of the children's wing. My brothers have, at long last, been ushered off to a suitably patrician boarding school; their disappearance has been the source of nothing but unfettered delights, Xi Go and I finally embracing one another with the avid intensity, vigor, and freedom that I've craved so desperately.

That familiar darkness ignites a sudden and tortured yearning for another forbidden delight, smoldering more fiercely than the muted vermillion seeping in lurid trickles from the eternally blazing lamps that barely struggle through the almost impossible blackness which drapes those chambers.

"_Shego_." I kiss her; it's irresistible, a fervent reflex that grips me the instant that the shadow-striated crimson overtakes us. Finally, within this still and private sanctuary, I can embrace her as ferociously as I crave; my hands, strengthened with unrelenting exercise and the wondrously blissful delights in her arms, fasten around her own. The disparity in our height is no longer so daunting; I claim and devour her without restraint, mouths meshing with a glorious dampness that virtually mimics a similar rapture.

"K-Kimberly-"

"_Shego_, I... I know, but..." I don't offer any words of understanding or acceptance; I merely kiss her again, lids suddenly so achingly weighty with this insufferable, swollen passion. Xi Go has rendered me absolutely mad, and I her; her own dark, limpid gaze is aflame with a truly gratifying desperation.

"You're so very cruel, Kimberly." A deep and sultry murmur as she, at long last, separates us with a finality that wrings a tortured groan from our throats at once. "The sweetest and most wonderful cruelty possible, but still cruel."

"I know." I embrace it; Xi Go is of an equal sadism, offering me lidded gazes and secret sighs that send me spiraling into shuddering lunacy when in my father's presence, or the providentially oblivious Vasilevich. However worldly he is, I'm infinitely delighted that the novelty of two women embracing, capturing one another in a love transcending time and life, is as foreign as Jupiter's surface.

"I'm so glad that you are, but don't you think that you should bathe?" That emerges as a breathless whisper, as if it's truly sacrilege to even suggests anything so agonizing.

"Come with me." I implore, as though that would be a decision that would see us anywhere near to the European chambers when Reinhardt and Jacqueline arrive this afternoon. As it is, struggling to peer through the churning curtains of mist and sullen sheets of roiling clouds, the sun's slant suggests that it's probably approaching noon; we've been awake since before the first seepage of that piteous and fragile luminosity through the dense boil of rainclouds that delivered a wondrous, soothing percussion to the roof above us throughout the evening. It serenaded us, joining with a blissful cadence of sighs and gasps, of low, keening cries; it ushered me into slumber, and Xi Go, finally, as well. I'm disappointed by the passage of the rain; I don't believe that there exists anything so beautiful in heaven and earth, aside from my beloved Xi Go.

"Kimberly..." Xi Go bathes with me each day, unless some urgently pressing engagement requires that we emerge within less than an ecstatic eternity; I eagerly await every instant that I can embrace her amid those blazing waters, admiring her creamy perfection alighting with a crimson aura. Xi Go, of course, has no need to actually bathe; her purity is absolute, not even the minutest suggestion of filth or grime clinging to her without explicit consent.

"I- I know." I've the restraint to accept that, even with a dismal and sullen whimper. "I know."

"I'd like to reward you with something, my Love, to commemorate your progress once we've finished." Xi Go announces with a rather jarring abruptness as we approach that familiar, stout wooden door.

"After my bath?" An avid chirp, as if every shred of frustration has vanished into the ether. I've discovered that, wrenching frustration from such engagements aside, it's impossible to be anything but utterly ecstatic in her presence for any length of time.

"Is that precisely an accomplishment?" My smile widens to implausible, almost childishly exaggerated proportions at my beloved's laconic murmur against my cheek as I'm tugged with an easy and effortless grace into her arms.

"Without you, it is." I grouse playfully.

"I'll tell you once we've seen away Jacqueline and your less-than-attentive suitor." That garners another exaggerated pout from me, though I no longer despise and resent Reinhardt; he and Jacqueline are confronting an ordeal very much like ours, and under greater scrutiny. It's impossible to restrain an extraordinary welling of sympathy for them at the merest notion of such achingly cruel restrictions upon the merest display of affection.

"I... I suppose so." Despite that drowsy mutter of grudging acceptance, it would be folly for my beloved to expect me to stir from the all-enveloping splendor of her embrace; her warmth engulfs me wondrously, bathing me in a truly palpable aura of comfort and security. The sense, the certainty, of absolute perfection in her arms overtakes me, and I know that nothing could ever be of greater import to me in this life than merely savoring that transcendental joy.

"You're so beautiful, My Kimberly." And my smile returns with a blazing, swollen immensity, shearing through the struggling facade of irritation that crumbles away as if frailest sand. "Don't you want to know?"

"I'd like to stay here forever." That confronts a quiet and contemplative chuckle.

"'Here', Kimberly?" She seems bemused, offering me a vaguely inquisitive arching of a fine eyebrow as she cups my chin, lifting my gaze to hers.

"In your arms. Don't be silly." And I plunge anew into Xi Go's warmth, burying my face against the willowy delight of her throat.

"Ah." A thoroughly delighted answer that emerges as a rapturous and serene sigh; Xi Go's hands fasten upon the small of my back, and I've the utterly sublime certainty that she'll also be content to ignore the progression of time, to invoke again that glorious aura of oblivious comfort that shields us from everything but the all-consuming bliss of our love. "So, you're not interested in your present?"

"Present?" It's perfectly ridiculous and almost mortifyingly childish, but I'm certain that my ears prick as if a rapacious fox at that word; every gift from my beloved has been of the most exquisite magnificence, of a joy and intimate majesty eclipsing even the last.

"Of course, my Love." Somehow, astonishingly, Xi Go manages to conjure these gifts seemingly from the ether; perhaps she harvests the services of other spirits that whirl in intangible droves around us. "But, if you're not interested, then I'm sure that-"

"You're so cruel." I'm unable to conjure the slightest shred of venom with that, however, despite the pouting cast of my features; I feel as if I should be a puppy, or even a kit fox, beseeching her with enormous eyes and a yearning whimper.

"I know, my Love; I know. But, isn't it important to maintain appearances?" That reminder of the dismal stupidity of reality, of obligation, duty, and these inane responsibilities, manages to pierce this dreamy haze of utter delight with the crushing weight of a poisoned lance; even the most fervent struggle is unable to restrain a sullen scowl that seems to peel with wrenching misery the smile from my lips.

"Yes." A low and aggrieved whisper. "I... I suppose that it is."

"I'm sorry, Kimberly." Xi Go apologizes, which renders me all the more intensely, unaccountably aggravated.

"Don't- don't apologize, _Shego_; this isn't your fault. It's... It's just not fair." I conclude lamely, affirming the blatantly obvious. "I- I feel as if it's mine; I'm still not yet powerful enough to leave my family, to abandon this nest. I... I just worry that I'm failing you."

"Please, do not." The warmth of her slim fingers lacing around my wrists, dragging my listless hands to the delicate heat of her cheeks, invigorates me. "Do not, Kimberly. You are not failing me; you astound me with your progress. And, I do not wish for you to leave, for you to be dragged away from your family without another word."

"I have no words for them, _Shego_." I know that she's struggling to comfort me, to reassure me, but I reel with a sudden and overpowering fury as that epiphany strikes me. "I... I barely feel as if they exist any longer; and it is not because of you, or this revelation, or anything that we have done. They... We have simply drifted apart, and I do not understand." A simmering resentment swells into a full boil; every moment of neglect, of this inexplicable distance, of my family's total indifference to me since our arrival, returns with a truly savage fury.

"Does it upset you, Kimberly?" Even the lovely dulcet tones of Xi Go's voice, weaving around me as if a net of golden threads to bind this rage, cannot restrain my anger.

"I..." 'Upset' does not quite begin to approach the immensity of this tortured frustration, this aggravation that flares and seethes with a blistering enormity. I should not care; such banality, such distant and trivial concerns, should be as relevant to me as the dark face of the moon, and yet it gnaws at me. This wretched sense of abandonment; this certainty that everything that had defined me, even as that Kimberly drifts into the distant blackness, has now cast me aside without a single thought. "I'm sorry, _Shego_."

"For what?" A mild twinge of strain flits through her lovely features, as if a brief, shivering twang of a tensioned string.

"For caring." I had never believed that I would speak those words. Even as the raw certainty of their distance, of their growing irrelevance to my life, became ever more frightfully pronounced, I was certain that such thoughts would remain private indulgences; vain and fantastic musings of exaggerated adolescent spite as I strove to separate myself from them in a desperate and raging affirmation of my independence.

As I finally articulate them, however, granting them a livid presence in my shuddering voice, I realize how powerfully and wrenchingly true they are; perhaps it is merely the fear that I may not care that sustains any connection with them, that grants an endurance to a dead soul of attachment. It seems to dissipate as though a fragile mist beneath the sun's unfettered blaze amid a glimmering film of tears.

"Kimerbly..." Xi Go seems uneasy, as well, as if some truly terrible and irreversible transgression has been committed at her unwitting urging.

"No, _Shego_... I... I simply don't know any longer; they seem to mean nothing to me. And- and it is not your fault; it is theirs. They abandoned me within that gilded prison; they expected me to be content with nothing but the beauty of the garden and the endless, towering walls that isolate us from all humanity. And- and it would be insufferable if it weren't for you. They have not once visited me in my quarters, as if I am a leper; the few words that I have heard have been through their proxies, or delivered with terse voices and cold eyes. Even..." A brief, hitching sob ruptures that shuddering rage. "Even Maria and Valentina have scorned me, and I do not understand why. It's as if I am cursed, as though they've had some sudden epiphany about me that I simply cannot aspire to comprehend."

"I am sorry, Kimberly." Despite the tears of sudden, profound emptiness, the liquid harvest of the void that has now begun to swallow that pitiful ember of tender warmth that I have cast into the dark, creeping in insufferably heavy tracts across my cheeks, my hands remain fastened upon my love's. My existence, never of broad and unbounded horizons, has narrowed further to my beloved; to that which has, at long last, granted meaning to a reality once bereft of substance and purpose. I feel myself, my true essence, softening toward Xi Go ever further, even as what remains of that Kimberly Dmitriovna is entombed, petrified amid the bleak forests of an indulgent and ignorant childhood.

Something seems to have broken within me; an intractable barrier suddenly as fragile as finest crystal, dashed against a stony resolve that flares through the tears.

"No." My words, emerging following a seeming eternity of that aching sense of irreversible, final transformation, stun even my senses with their fury; Xi Go appears positively stricken, those beauteous sloe pools seeming to flood above their pale shores with the enormity of her gaze. I kiss her; perhaps it is a childish thought in itself, but I suddenly feel as if a true woman, separated from those lingering and adolescent attachments, plunging with a sudden and livid intensity of focus into my life.

"K-Kimberly?"

"No; do not apologize for what has happened. If it had not been for you, my life would be empty and without meaning, _Shego_." A stern shake of my head; tangled and matted locks rustle against cheeks aching with flecks of clotted soil. "My family... I will humor them until we can finally be alone together, but I have no intention of clinging to them like a child any longer." I hope that the words I speak are true; that this courage is not merely a drunkard's confidence, born of a furious welter of ephemeral emotion.

"Are you certain?" She seems to have been awaiting this moment for ages, and yet it appears to strike her with a truly aching grief, as if she can feel that sense of loss even more acutely than I.

"I am not ashamed to be with you, _Shego_. I am not ashamed to love you; I never could be." My cheeks flare with a raw and tortured flush at the thought of anyone believing that I should be; the notion that my family would disdain us for an inarticulate sense of sin that seems a cruel affront to the very spirit of the divine with its worldly and corrupting hate. I realize that I despise them for that; for the sense that their daughter and a love transcending time and life would be of lesser import than propriety and rigid dogma; I hate them.

"Then you are more like Bao Li than you have ever been." My raging introspection suddenly reverses itself, a whispered, 'what', emerging from my taut lips. "You are more like Bao Li than you ever have been, my Love." She repeats.

"I don't understand."

"You... While you have not always been reticent about me, you have often worried for our love, for what your family would think of it; you have not always been so willing to abandon them, to dismiss everything for our union." A mild, quirking smile struggles to dispel a dreadful sense of betrayal, of weakness, even in those distant lives. "You have never abandoned me, however; even when you have told me that you feared for what they would think, for shaming them, you could not bear to be apart from me."

"_Shego_, I... I'm sorry." I truly should be; that certainty strikes me with a savage intensity. While I may be Kimberly Dmitriovna... I can hardly bear that patronymic any longer, I realize; even the merest thought of it torments me, as if such a name corrodes my own identity with the taint of my bestial family... While I may be Kimberly, I am also those women; that soul bears with it those eternities of existence, of collective experience graven upon its enduring core; their sins and failures are mine; that love is without end, even when so cruelly ruptured by the whims of fate, and those deeds that have tortured Xi Go are my own.

"For what?"

"For being so foolish. For..." Flickers of memories return, as they have so often in preceding weeks; they unfurl as if ephemeral, ethereal flowers beneath a supernatural sun, briefly lunging into fullest blossom before wilting in an instant. Streaking, disorienting whirls of images and impressions; of Xi Go's features contorted with unutterable grief through a mist of tears; of unfathomable rage; of a sense of the most hellish abandonment. My true eyes jolting open again with the recession of that brief waking nightmare that seemed to endure for an insufferable eternity, and I find myself clutched in her unyielding embrace, consumed by the palpitating rhythm of her heart.

"Kimberly, please." My love urges, and yet I cannot.

"I... I know that you are lying for my sake, but..." I've begun to weep again; blistering, torturous streams that flood along my cheeks, bearing with them the lingering vestiges of that memory, even as the raw and unendurable certainty of that terrible evil remains gouged into my spirit.

"No." A stern and harsh hiss that startles me, that raises a renewed swell of tears into my eyes; they blot out everything but a vague ripple of fabric, distorted with the boiling, sanguine darkness of the corridor and a haze of scalding torment. "No, Kimberly; do not say anything of that. No matter what those few flickers of memories may tell you, they are merely a fragment of the truth. A grain of sand does not make a beach; a pebble does not make a mountain. That one torment is little more than a trifle." The pain, the savage and real anguish that knifes through this ancient soul, that resonates with a mad, vibrating, wailing awfulness with the jade, does not agree; but I must. I cannot resist her, cannot overcome the beauteous tyranny of her command.

"You have hurt me, and I... I have hurt you; that pain I will regret always, but we remain united, Kimberly. If our love did not transcend life and time, if we..." Her whisper becomes an uncontrollable, wracking sob. "If we did not reaffirm our devotion, our love, when... When we are parted, then we would not remain together; you would not bear these accursed memories, as you would not hold those of unparalleled beauty in your heart. Please, believe me."

And I do. It's tinged with a relentless, self-flagellating loathing for myself, for whatever I may have done in a distant past, but my acceptance is absolute; I could never begrudge Xi Go anything. I trust her; my remembrance is excruciatingly incomplete, even as those gaps merely further intensify this soaring pyre that rages within my breast.

"I... I do." A palpable wave of relief washes through Xi Go, sleek muscles taut with a rippling strain suddenly relaxing; her fingers remain fastened upon the small of my back, unwilling to release me.

"Do you promise me, Kimberly?" There is no trace of levity in her tone, however utterly glorious it nevertheless is; there is nothing but a crushing, commanding presence, seeming to suggest that she's willing to imprison me in the blissful folds of her embrace for an eternity if she must.

"Yes." I do; that vow emerges as a strained whisper, barely able to draw breath with the utter ferocity of my lover's embrace. "I promise you, _Shego_."

"I'm glad, Kimberly; I am. I... I didn't desire to upset you; I was simply astonished by your resolve, by how powerfully you resemble Bao Li. She, too, was undaunted by anything; and while she may not have had a family, nothing could ever trouble her in her zeal to be forever with me."

"Nothing will discourage me, _Shego_. I intend to tell my parents everything, no matter what their opinion, when I finally am prepared." Another affirmation that somehow, astonishingly, manages to startle her, despite this astounding litany of revelations that no longer even stun me.

"Kimberly?"

"Why shouldn't I, _Shego_? Perhaps I should just invite them to our wedding." An irrepressible smile snakes with a certain serpentine snideness along my lips.

"Kimberly..." A quiet and tentative intake of breath, which I assuredly do not expect from my courageous and undaunted Xi Go.

"What is it?"

"Aren't you... Maybe overreacting a little?"

"No." My resolve is stouter than steel. "I've no intention of concealing our love, even if they never accept it. Did my family... My families ever?" It's a surreal notion to visualize others in that march of lives; it seems as if it should merely have been my family, again and again, resurrected as assuredly as my spirit to torment me throughout those lives.

"No. Not- not everyone, in any event. You... You have had friends, and sisters, and even a mother who supported you deeply; in other lives, you have been an outcast." A smile of the utmost, distant despondence. "Even a fiancé, once."

"A fiancé?" I suppose that Xi Go had mentioned masquerading once as a matchmaker; or, perhaps she truly was.

"You did not love one another as anything but deep and inseparable friends; you had been acquainted since childhood, in fact. He lied to his own parents, and to yours, to protect us; he ignored his duty, his divinely-mandated obligation as a man, to urge us together."

"I wish that I held those memories."

"They will return, I am certain; when you are... When you are perfected, at long last, as an immortal, those memories will return; your remembrance of everything, terrible and joyous."

"Did yours?"

"W-what do you mean?"

"When you became _Xiannu_. Did your own memories return?"

"There were none; my soul had undergone complete transmigration, and there was nothing but that essence remaining. There was no pact with the gods to preserve me; I was as an uncarved stone, awaiting another life without thought and impression."

"Oh."

"Humans ordinarily cannot preserve their remembrances of death; they are much too terrible. Even the merciless gods of the underworld take pity upon them once they have endured their turmoil and torture in repentance for their sins and evils in life."

"What?"

"It... It is much like your own people's sense of hell; _Diyu_ is a place of penitence and cruelty, where suffering is meted out to those that have behaved without virtue. Yen Lo Wang is the King of _Diyu_; he judges souls before a perfected mirror that reflects what lies within their spirit, and guides them toward their destination, be it transcendence or condemnation."

"Why, then, do I hold these memories?" I do not understand; should I not also bear the scars of such unfathomable torment?

"Your soul has never seen Yen Lo Wang's domain since... Since that day." It has begun to rain again, I realize, a quiet and droning percussion joining the darkening of Xi Go's voice. "It is glorious, but... But, I often wonder to where it has gone. Your soul cannot partake of the tea of forgetfulness; you will never, ever be parted from me in spirit, for you cannot forget me."

"Oh."

"I have often, in moments of unbearable fear, worried that you may remain as a ghost until you can be reincarnated; that you may endure, desolate and alone, wondering what has become of me. I..." It's obvious that she is as tormented as I am by this, to even ponder anything so terrible; and yet the words seem to flow with the inexorable, thundering ease of the rain. "I remain beside you, performing mystic rites to care for you; I oversee you, wailing with grief, until... Until it is no longer possible. I even burn offerings, though I know that you will never have use for them."

"I'm sorry." Those words are barely audible amid the escalating cadence of the rain, and yet they seem virtually deafening; I wish to apologize for everything, for every failure, for every moment of sorrow, in her life and my own; for my weakness; for my flaws; for every instant in which we have been apart, for which she has been forced to persevere in my absence.

"Do not be." A stern and insistent shake of her head, delicate tendrils rustling against creamy cheeks glistening with fine droplets that cannot be rain. "Do not be." A feeble smile struggles across her features; a desultory sniffle inspires me to brush a brief and achingly delicate kiss against the fine peak of her nose. "You should bathe, my Love."

"Huh?" A complete disorientation manages to leech into this moment of aching sorrow amid the rain.

"You should bathe. If we don't make this engagement, then I fear that you'll never see your gift." Another arduous smile, as if she simply cannot bear a further instant of grief, dispelling it with the ferocious force of will alone.

"W-what?"

"Your gift, Kimberly. Did I not promise you something glorious?"

"I- I suppose that you did." I'd nearly forgotten about that amid this sudden and jarring emotional tumult.

"And, if you've still any interest in it..." She teases; I surrender to that almost aching desperation, joining her in a quiet giggle that raises a spectacular welter of relief into her stricken visage.

"I know, I know. I'll be a good girl, _Shego_." She refuses to release me, however, and I again am unwilling to unfasten her wondrous, soothing arms from around me. "I promise."

"Not always, I hope." That sensual purr manages to jolt me away from even the remotest vicinity of that sorrow. It does not vanish; it could never, I suspect, until that unrelenting, gnawing terror finally evaporates into distant memory, but it seems more remote, less immediate in its grating enormity.

"O-of course not, _Shego_." The flush that creeps of its own accord into my cheeks, winding with a sinuous and unhurried grace across my skin, is a further relief. I realize that I feel very much myself, even with a renewed attachment to those past lives; I am Kimberly... Kimberly Go? Kimberly Xi?

"Kimberly?" An inquisitive gaze seems to confirm the sense of a cross-eyed contemplation.

"I... I was just wondering something."

"About what?"

"If we're married, what is my name?"

"Kimberly." Another quirking grin that finally alights with a genuine mirth.

"N-not that name. I meant, what would my surname be? Xi? Go?"

"Why bother with such trifles, Kimberly? You are my Kimberly; I am your _Shego_. That's my name; nothing can alter that now. And I love yours."

"O-oh."

"We will have no need for anything so frivolous; there is no need for anything but one another in that great, infinite joy."

"I no longer wish to be a Vozmozhnym... It- I feel nothing for that name; nothing for that life. It's as if, even if I were that person, I no longer am Kimberly Dmitriovna." A furrowing of Xi Go's brows. "Not that those memories, those thoughts have ceased to be, but... Everything that was so rotten about me then; that spoiled ignorance; that hopeless frailty... I think, I hope, that those have vanished."

"I hope not." She startles me with that sudden, sullen murmur. "I fell in love with my Kimberly; and I know for certain that you haven't changed. I won't allow you to change, my Love." It's a jarring epiphany, and one that sends a momentous swell of joy lunging through me with the knowledge that my life has not been a complete squandering of time until the moment of our union. I've been so fixated upon transformation, upon redefining myself, that I've begun to distance myself quite ridiculously from everything; it's impossible to truly achieve that, I realize. "Your virtues and vices are you; I love you."

"I- I know."

"I have had a great deal of time to live, to contemplate such things. It's a natural transition; you are defining yourself with me, with our lives, but it doesn't mean that what you were before is vanishing. There's a difference between growing older and losing yourself."

"I suppose so." I truly know that she speaks the truth; my present zeal seems embarrassingly near to the childish exaggeratedness with which I pursued everything as the 'past' Kimberly. "Still... Will you bathe me?" I implore, one hand brushing with a blind, questing struggle across the elegantly-graven wood in search of the icy knob; with a solid purchase, I press it aside with a strength that is at once bewilderingly foreign and now so sublimely natural, an arctic wind welling from within playing across my heated flesh.

"Mustn't I ready myself?" It's a surreal notion, and a bit frightening, actually, to be without Xi Go; we've bathed together everyday, basking in that molten splendor of this curious home's artificial spring, the fragrant and crisp waters roiling across our skin as we lay intertwined within its crystalline embrace. I realize that it's terrifying; not for being forced to bathe myself, but to be separated from her; to be parted from that wondrous, sensuous magnificence of the creamy warmth of her skin beneath my caress, and my own beneath her glorious ministrations. A yammering, insistent voice in the fringes of my thoughts reminds me that I still approach any separation with a tortured and inarticulate terror, convulsed with fear at the notion of the whole of this somehow dissolving as if a dream.

My most horrific nightmares strike me while awake; these vague and preposterous concerns that are animated with a sudden and phantasmagorical energy when I'm denied her presence. A niggling anxiety becomes a thundering doubt; seconds become hours or eternities, as though I've again perished from this earthly plane. It's as if they never existed when we're reunited, but the slightest prospect of separation revives them again with such urgent intensity.

"I..." I struggle to conjure a confidence into my voice that is transparently absent elsewhere; my fingertips shiver with a palpable terror upon the knob.

"You'll be fine, Kimberly. Do you believe that I'd vanish after three centuries because you were bathing?" Xi Go truly is a sorceress; my thoughts must simply be perennially exposed to her searching gaze.

"Well, no, but..."

"You won't, either, Kimberly; I promise you that. I can take flight, my Love; even if you ran, or evil spirits sought to sweep you away, I would reclaim you in an instant." It is true; I have no doubt, having witnessed my beloved levitate with an effortless grace, as if the earth's grasp is as ably overcome as a nagging infant's.

"All right." Those words are more hers than mine, but I finally relent. "Do you promise that you'll never leave me?" I must seem ridiculous and childish, begging for this vow for anything so trivial as this brief separation; but it is not trivial to me. It seems daunting and terrifying in this state, particularly amid the rippling, rain-streaked darkness; a distant, seething peal of thunder accompanies the blazing streak of lightning, an incandescent specter that fills at once, for a brief instant, the whole of this world with a blistering terror.

"I promise, Kimberly." And, with a lingering and glorious brush of the full, pert delight of her lips, we are parted; I struggle to persuade myself with every instant, every thought, as I ease into the sullen, shadowed solemnity of the bath, that it is merely for these few moments. My clothing vanishes in an instant; a dressing gown now lies eternally atop that most glorious stoop beside the bath upon which I was reintroduced to my destiny. My costume is shed with a crisp and unnervingly stony rattle upon the tiles, tiny flecks of dust spiraling forth into the wilted shadow that the wing's lamps barely pierce in its velvet immensity.

That singular inner light of the soul, however piteously dimmed in her absence, wells from within me with barely a breath, now; an intuitive focus places now familiar forces into alignment, a prickling warmth signaling the pooling and blending of those majestic elixirs into proper alchemy. There is no tangible light; nothing reflects from the tiles, and yet everything is at once lit in stunning relief, a luminous aura of emerald affording an unfettered perspective upon the cloths, towels, and soap heaped beside the basin. With a supreme urgency, I force myself into the icy depression of wondrous mosaic beauty, unleashing a churning torrent of water with a brief twist of a faucet that once required a severe, straining struggle. Momentous, gurgling sheets of it deluge across my skin as I press beside it, braving its scalding savagery with a stoicism that becomes effortless as my flesh hardens into stone.

Even as the blazing currents trail along my cheeks, I feel nothing; this inner light pulsates from within me, my breath stilling and finally halting completely with a final, level intake. Astonishingly, a desperation more terrible than any battlefield struggle overwhelms me, guiding and honing that supernatural instinct to a precise and flawless balance; I can actually feel the elixirs refine themselves further, mingling with a discerning grace until they attain a bewildering purity. There is no strain; I feel no difficulty, rising with the soaring water with a lightness that transcends any natural buoyancy.

I have not yet taken flight, but I feel as if that lies within my grasp; a flicker of motion finds the soap and shampoo in my grasp, along with the rag. Another blink places me beside the faucet again, beginning to knead the lathering, perfumed delight through my locks. Even as I've yearned for Xi Go's wondrous scent, my love has demanded that I retain my own; she adores the exotic fragrances of fruit, tinged with a mild spice. With lightning celerity, I bathe, even as thunder roars with a vengeful ferocity beyond this chamber; I do not linger upon a single point, ignoring that blazing, throbbing core of longing that I can feel screaming for attention with the familiar caress of the water and the singular scent of a soap that I can identify now with nothing but Xi Go's tender ministrations.

Rinsing myself beneath the flooding arcs of seething crystal, my cheeks blaze with an intensity not born of the heat enveloping me as I reflect upon that delight; Xi Go pleading to admire me as I explored myself, fingers quivering with a desperate and almost unaccountable anxiety as my hands trailed upon my own skin. However wantonly, ravenously I had claimed her, that was such an extraordinary experience; to immerse myself anew in those moments of unfathomable yearning, furtive fantasies barely supplying even the subtlest suggestion of that roiling and fervent eroticism that now convulses us with glorious abandon.

I melted beneath her blazing gaze; I quaked and shivered at the unearthly sensation of that soaring ecstasy rising beneath my own searching caress. It's merely the frailest parody of the utter transcendence that I achieve in her arms, but it nevertheless is a sensual delight beyond description; my fingers tingle even now with that visceral and instinctual pining, however ridiculous it is to my conscious mind, consumed with the desperate need to be with her.

It barely even warrants my notice when my hands are no longer necessary to drag myself from the pool; the absence of that familiar chill upon my palms is apparent solely in retrospect as a deft and effortless lunge places me at the center of the chamber, beside a towel that I sweep from the floor, unfolding it with a graceful rippling of fabric. I swaddle myself in it, grinding away every shred of moisture with a furious urgency that grows with manic intensity at every moment that my love and I are parted; the dressing gown whispers across my shoulders, sensation finally returning with the brush of that wondrous silk that is of the most abrasive misery by contrast with the caress that ordinarily joins this emergence from the bath.

My gaze flickers briefly, with a sullen irritation, to the costume that lies crumpled at my feet; striated with colossal streaks of mud, an enormous clot adorning the seat of its trousers, it's obvious that it will involve more than a bit of effort to cleanse. A foot lashes out, sending it lashing with a roaring crackle of cotton against one of the walls, before I emerge from the bath with a gentle click of the knob; the scowl contorting my features becomes a mask of utter rapture as I glimpse upon my love, lurking before the door with a wondrously inviting grin. It's my favored gown, yet again; that sublime ensemble in jade and ebony, her glorious raven tresses freely spilling across her shoulders, streaming to the small of her back. My arms fasten around her waist, a quiet gasp issuing from her as I cannon into my beloved.

"I missed you." A whisper, hot with relieved anxiety, floods from within me; I feel myself deflating, those unconsciously preserved alignments slackening and drifting away into the ether as my body becomes completely human again. It feels as if it's a reunion after ages of separation; I know that it's little more than ten minutes, if that.

"As I missed you, My Kimberly." It feels wondrously indecent, embracing her while clasped in little more than this diaphanous mist of virtually formless silk. It isn't my ordinary dressing gown; it's another of her glorious gifts, an impossibly fragile shell that drifts around my body as though a cloud of translucent fabric; I feel rather like a lurid Sheikh's harem girl, eagerly savoring my lover's touch.

"I... I'm ready." Several damp tendrils cling to my cheeks, and she brushes them away with a lingering relish, the fine pads of her fingers grazing hotly across my flesh. It raises a mutual gasp from us, a sudden and ferocious electricity arcing between our bodies; her eyes darken further, immersing me within those commanding pools of boilingly erotic black. "I... I definitely am." There's little doubt of what I intend; I'm astounded by the iron resilience of her will as she, at long last, grudgingly and agonizingly, peels her hand from my skin.

"I- I definitely know that." We're truly inextricably intertwined; at this distance, sensation freely flits and crackles between us, and she can perceive the raging, insistent pulse of my arousal, pooling in the pit of my stomach and coursing through every inch of my body, as intensely as I can hers.

"Do you truly think this is that important?"

"Yes." Xi Go lies. I do feel a sense of attachment to Reinhardt and Jacqueline, but it's not sufficient to render this any less onerous. Nevertheless, I don't protest, beyond a tortured groan, as Xi Go takes my hand with the utmost tenderness, ushering me toward our bedchambers. The door clatters closed behind us as I wrench at the knob, teeth fastening upon pert lips as I fix Xi Go with a brutally insistent stare. I can virtually feel my skin ablaze with a molten lust, sheathed with an excitement that I absolutely cannot contain in her presence.

"You... You are so cruel, Kimberly." A playfully tantalizing smile that dissolves my legs, even as I shed my dressing gown, gingerly and with the utmost caution setting it upon the mattress beside me as I settle onto silken splendor. The sheets are perfumed with us; that blissful and sublime, powerful essence of femininity that further heightens the craving enormity of my arousal.

"You did this to me, _Shego_." When I'm overcome by these thralls of pure, wanton madness, every lingering vestige of inhibition dissolves; it's as if I'm possessed by a sexual demon, coaxing words that would leave me gasping with astonishment under ordinary circumstances from my lips with the utmost ease. Sloe beauty roves across my flesh with an appraising intensity as I adopt an exaggerated pout, gently reclining upon the mattress to accentuate the gentle curves of my body that exhilarate her; the softness of pale thighs graze against one another with a quiet whisper of creamy skin.

"I know." She cannot conjure the slightest shred of urgency as she kneels before me; that self-conscious, blushing torment that overtook me as she first aided me with my stockings hasn't vanished, but it has become something entirely more lurid. Even as my cheeks blaze, I'm unable to restrain the quiet and keening moans and whimpers that every lingering, rapturous stroke of her palms raises from my lips. Fingertips play across my skin as she, with the deferential tenderness of a servant, aids her Princess with silken undergarments; the tingling, fine presence of my garter follows.

"I... I love this." How could I not? Even as I struggle not to tangle my fingers in the vast, lustrous delight of her raven locks, dragging her with an insistent fury toward that pulsating core of this aphrodisiac madness, I shiver with anticipation as Xi Go plunges into a delight that renders her virtually insane with a yearning for me. Slim fingers delicately coax my legs into the sleek, shimmering contours of ivory stockings, drawing them with a deliberate, languorous and wholly unchaste relish across my skin.

She adores the delicate contrast of creamy skin and fine silk; her touch plays along that gap, even as she fastens the stockings to my garters with a thoroughly contrived focus. I have no doubt of what her true fixation is; I embrace it, gently pivoting my legs in her grasp to indulge her. The first caress of her full lips wrings a quiet gasp from me; another, and another, yielding gasping moans that resound from the very depths of my throat; the delicate, laving stroke of her tongue, brief and playful, across that seam separating my skin from that lovely fabric, engenders a scream of unendurable vexation.

"_Shego_!" How can I not yearn to admonish her, to demand that she worship me with the supplication I am due, as she eases away, peering at me with lidded eyes and parted lips.

"I'm sorry, Princess." A chuckle of the utmost sadism, before she rises with a deliberate and glorious grace to her heeled feet. It's a struggle not to pounce upon her, to ravish her as if a feral beast, as she assists me with dressing; delicately fastening the corset of an extraordinarily, unnecessarily taut dress, a dark violet that mother always despised for its intolerable flamboyance, that strains around my bosom. Despite that unrelenting, crushing pressure that threatens to expel every breath I barely manage to force into my lungs, I'm secretly consumed by a certain vain delight at its design; I finally appear more womanly, breasts swelling against their constraints with virtually the wondrous vigor that Xi Go's do.

"I love this dress." Xi Go accentuates that point with a brief lacing of her arms around my waist's slender arc from behind, plunging her face with a wanton relish into the mass of fragrant locks spilling across my shoulders. While they've begun to dry, she confronts no difficulty in brushing them as she settles behind me upon the bed, drawing that wondrous heirloom in graceful, deliberate strokes through once hopelessly tangled filaments that obligingly part as if guided by her magic.

"Do you, _Shego_?" My mind is alight with a richly wondrous tapestry of memories of this gown; particularly of Xi Go peeling it away with a delicate, tender obsequiousness, showering me with adoring praise as she indulged herself with the role of my servant...

"I love you, Kimberly; every part of you. And, well, anything that accentuates your glorious beauty is particularly splendid."

"I love you." I reel at any praise from my beloved, from anything that affirms that I'm deserving of her incomparable magnificence; that proclaims that I'm not merely the hopelessly plain, shapeless and unremarkable Kimberly Dmitriovna. I feel as if I am her _Tsarevna_, her Princess... Her goddess.

"Come, My Kimberly." A seismic groan tumbles from the very depths of my soul as that rich and sublime warmth vanishes from behind me; Xi Go materializes before me in an instant, hand outstretched to urge me upright.

"Must we?" Fingers play suggestively along the diligently laced corset, suggesting with remarkably little subtlety that it would not be unduly challenging to unfasten it.

"Yes." Spoken with the conviction of a man before the Inquisition's torturers, Xi Go nevertheless guides me to my shoes, ushering me from the room before I manage to dissolve the lingering vestiges of her resolve. Even my footfalls are now inaudible; scarcely more than the mildest rustle of fabric signals our silent passage, drifting through the corridors toward the walk that, today, is draped with a beauteous vermillion shroud.

Merely the gentlest suggestion of a fine, chilled mist seeps beneath it, the quaking thunder of countless, fat droplets pummeling the beauteous and robust fabric. The sun is invisible amid the boiling thunderclouds; occasional, seething streaks of incandescence transform this sullen twilight into most radiant noon, before receding into the swimming darkness.

I expect the looming enormity of my father, increasingly pallid and distant with every brief and torturous encounter; the great hall, however, is void of anything but its signature scarlet gleam, the periodic, whistling gusts that ghost through the compound swelling those rippling points of light to soaring infernos, bathing the dark wood in an infernal radiance.

"Papa?" I cannot believe the conflicted jumble of emotions that his absence engenders; a sense of relief and unfathomable grief that dance and intermingle with a maddening promiscuity. They become inseparable, my grief becoming a relief at any lingering attachment, regardless of my vows; my relief becoming a matter of the utmost sorrow at the thought that I truly have drifted so unbridgeably far from my family. "Father?" A quiet resound of my voice; it returns, muffled by the murmuring winds, as a feeble and wretched whimper.

"I do not think that anyone is here, Kimberly." Even Xi Go appears a bit astonished, though more unambiguously pleased by his absence.

"I... I see." I do; his absence is a spectacular, black void where there should be his presence, however progressively more spectral and distant.

"Come." My beloved indulges me with a quiet, encouraging murmur; if nothing else, I can continue to savor the tender delight of her slim fingers interwoven with mine, tugging me toward the European chambers. My feet, however levitous and unencumbered, feel leaden with the epiphany of this responsibility; of the nature of this deception, however congenial. My parents continue to maintain this outrage, this obscenity, this affront to my very soul; this persistent, clamoring demand that I marry; this arrogant presumption that I should be enraptured on sight of a young man whom I have never met, and whose affection for me is no greater than my own for him.

This walk is also shrouded against the elements, I discover upon emerging from that shadow-dappled scarlet haze; a similar crimson drape that crackles with the occasional, playful tug of ethereal fingers. The storm is intensifying further, deluging the stone with enormous, hammering sheets that send orphan droplets lunging toward us with hopes of embrace. As Xi Go chivalrously eases open the stout oaken door, subtly swollen with the electrifying humidity of the storm, we discover the stifling pomp of the European chambers vacant; we do not confront the familiar, uneasy spectacle of Reinhardt and Jacqueline, nestled against one another at the brilliant flare of the electric chandelier, diamond shards casting luminous beads upon the pallid carpeting and wallpaper.

"They've yet to arrive, it seems." Xi Go muses, the door latching quietly behind her; we settle beside one another upon a grotesquely overstuffed sofa, effusively pliant material sagging beneath even our modest weight as though clay beneath a locomotive. It raises a slightly bemused giggle from me as we list toward one another, my love's arms lacing protectively around me as if to console me amid such a quaking terror.

I cannot resist the yearning to kiss her; to claim her, to devour her sweet splendor, to embrace her with a fierce and manic intensity of a lust barely in abeyance. Perhaps I cannot take her here; perhaps I cannot beg for her touch, but her lips are irresistible. So immersed am I in her warmth that I do not even notice the quiet creak of a door until a savage peal of thunder transitions to a muted gasp.


	11. Child

With unfiltered enormity, the savage and concussive shudder of a sudden thunderclap rolls across us; a palpable presence in rippling sound, instantly filling the stifling, cloyingly perfumed chambers with its vast fury. A tingling, electric humidity is borne upon an unaccountable chill that grazes my cheeks, rustling my hair with a damp wind that simply cannot be. Even as a quiet gasp registers in my distant and gauzy awareness, my lips remained fastened to Xi Go's with a desperation born of unfathomable terror.

My fingers convulse with a trembling fear upon the warmth of her cheeks; my eyes snap open, forcing me from that blissful and oblivious haze of utter rapture in her embrace. Xi Go's arms to do not fall from their magnificent anchorage around my waist; her slender hands remain still, digits unyielding in their grasp upon my body. We remain rooted to the sagging, pliant enormity of the cushions, clasped in this achingly frozen thrall. It feels as if time has slowed, every instant plodding forth with deliberate, grinding torment.

A tiny, fragile voice whispers from within the deepest reaches of my soul, whimpering that we should turn, that I should offer an immediate, blathering litany of apologies and platitudes; that I should assure our guests, those graceless intruders, of the utterly benign essence of this embrace. I should affirm that it's nothing of relevance, that it's merely a gentle and completely innocent kiss between... Between a student and her governess? A swollen, prideful rage swells above that feeble-minded wretch that remains of my unassertive childhood; it overwhelms that squealing, pathetic soul with a howling command that I continue kissing Xi Go, that I simply ignore them entirely; that I immerse myself wholly in this wondrous, sublime love and comfort, regardless of anyone's opinion.

Ultimately, however, I am paralyzed; fixed to my beloved until a familiar intonation ruptures this delirious clash. "Kimberly? Miss _Shego_?" Reinhardt's stammer is of the utmost bafflement; perhaps he barely even understands what he's seen. With grinding struggle, I realize that Xi Go is separating herself from me, albeit merely of a minute distance that suddenly seems absolutely insufferable in its torturous immensity; any gap between us, any divide between that glorious and transcendental warmth, is the cruel grip of the grave.

"R-Reinhardt? We- we didn't see you enter. Or hear you." I cannot bear to turn; my gaze remains unyieldingly anchored upon my beloved's features, contorted with an uncanny mask of bewilderment. For once, unaccountably, she appears positively awestruck; lacking her characteristic, easy grace and elegance, groping desperately for any words that will simply dissolve this cringing agony.

"I... I suppose not. We, uh... We were just told to join you here by, er, your father's manservant. C-Chang, I think." His voice betrays a similar, trembling daze; his words seem to trail along matters of the utmost irrelevance as his reeling mind struggles to capture any coherent sense of our present circumstances. "Yes, I- I think that was his name. Chang. O-odd fellow, you know, and-"

"That's enough." It's impossible to resist a wince at those familiar, arctic tones, lancing through this whirling mutual bewilderment as if a blade through frailest lace. With that, I can finally turn, as well; Jacqueline stands beside her lover, that familiar figure of arch, humorless intensity. She offers us not even the minutest quirk of a smile; penetrating pools of azure have frozen into cruel shards, seeming to bore through my very soul.

"P-please, come in." I discover myself speaking, tone quaking and rippling amongst a full range of strangled pitches; a desperate, shivering need for this to vanish, for that relentless, rumbling thunder to evaporate into nothingness as if it will carry away the furious, throbbing percussion of my heart with it, overtakes me. I've little doubt that my own eyes have become vast, flooding above their banks with unblinking enormity. Xi Go's slender arms remained twined languorously around my waist, even as she seems utterly petrified with a sudden and indissoluble tension. "Please." Please. "And, um, close the door, if you will."

Reinhardt complies immediately; with characteristic chivalry, he had urged Jacqueline before him into the chamber, now pulsating with an absolutely overpowering, susurrating anxiety of animal terror barely in abeyance beneath this surreal patina of patrician politesse. The door clatters closed behind him; finally, completely, the quiet click of its latch a positively deafening report as it slashes through this strained and tortured silence.

"Reinhardt..." The brittle strains of Jacqueline's speech finally shatter that frightfully harsh, frail crystalline facade of normality. "W- we should go, shouldn't we? I-"

"No." A further welter of pure, liquid startlement as Xi Go finally speaks again; every semblance of vaulting, unreasoning terror seems to have evaporated from her voice as it returns to its signature, velvet elegance. "Please, do not. I... Kimberly and I..." I struggle to capture her gaze; she seems to avoid it, dark oceans roiling with a storming conflict. Finally, horrifically, those tortured sloe pools snap completely away from my own, narrowing as she draws a deep and shuddering breath. "I forced-"

"She forced me not to tell you." Those words lunge from the very depths of my soul, raging with an abject and insufferable grief at the thoughts that I could sense coalescing within my lover; of such utterly cruel, narcissistic martyrdom, sacrificing herself regardless of my wishes and desires. It ignites a savage, self-flagellating anguish; a jarring resurrection of that seething torment from every instant in which I had not devoted myself wholly to our love, to that adoration that consumes me with its scouring flames that allow nothing but the purity and enormity of our union to endure. "It's- it's perfectly silly, isn't it?"

"Kimberly-"

"No, it is, I think." I interrupt Xi Go with a razor-edged intensity, claiming beauteous and fragile darkness alight with a fear that I cannot reconcile with her strength. "It is perfectly ludicrous, the thought of anyone thinking less of us for this, isn't it?" Perhaps it's a desperately overcompensating bombast born of this sudden, urgent clamoring for my complete independence from that feeble and insecure creature that had been Kimberly Dmitriovna, eternally stifling her own needs and desires for the sake of propriety; perhaps it is a madness that may recede with a tortured regret, but I cannot ignore this harsh, glowering fire that unfolds from within me. Scarlet with the raging immensity of this union, fed by the love that I have been denied throughout these seventeen years, the flames pour through my lips as a sternly confident scream constrained by a trembling shell of blithe, neutral normality.

"I- I see." Reinhardt obviously does not expect this from me; he goggles at that almost manic self-assurance; this is not the Kimberly that he had visualized from our past encounter; not the blushing, tortured, pining creature that had not yet even experienced the transcendental heights of liberation in her lover's arms; the Kimberly that had not discovered the true essence of the soul, of this eternal and sublime union that courses and shivers along every nerve, that reminds me of the indelible imprint of this love upon my spirit. "That..." I revolt at the judgment that I now witness coalescing in his gaze; darkening, it seems to narrow with the force of vulgar intolerance that I have dreaded. I can virtually feel that awful, bestial word of hatred welling within him: sin.

"I do not know what to say." And, disarmingly, that familiar, handsomely guileless smile forms across his lips, albeit with a brittle and halting awkwardness. "I sincerely do not. I... This is all very odd."

"I suppose that it is." Xi Go is genuinely stunned; her lovely, full lips, darkly rouged to dissemble that wondrous and exotic ebony, work with a manic muteness, seemingly struggling to coax anything coherent from them. "Please, join us, Reinhardt. Jacqueline." My voice is frail, despite that mad flush of almost hysterical confidence; I feel as if it may simply shatter into a vast stream of tortured shards at any moment, as expansive and chaotic as the riotous swell of diamonds that diffuse the chandelier's glare, even as I struggle to preserve any trace of composure.

"I... I did not know that you and your governess were lovers." It seems as if Reinhardt's legs carry him with the force of instinct alone; Jacqueline joins him, silent and ungrudging, settling with a dainty reserve upon the sofa beside him, slender stockinged legs folding and unfolding with an anxious energy as she strives to adopt a posture that will ameliorate the transparent discomfort convulsing both lovers.

"We are. We... We will be wed." And every semblance of fear dissolves at the instant those wondrous words caress my senses; I realize that they have emerged from my lips, welled from the very depths of my soul. I suddenly cannot conjure the slightest shred of worry for Reinhardt's answer; whether he will condemn me for my sin, or lavish us with congratulations for anything so glorious. The knowledge that Xi Go and I will be eternally intertwined, and that another will know of this, is transcendental in its pure and singular joy.

"You are to be married? T-that is extraordinary. Congratulations." Every moment that I speak seems to force Reinhardt further and further off-guard; he visibly reels with an enervated bafflement, as though the previous several moments have dilated into centuries of crushing ordeal. His voice is unsteady, tentative, as if he's yet to quite regain any conscious control of his own mind. "That... That is most remarkable." He finally, rather awkwardly, concludes.

"Reinhardt." Perhaps Jacqueline is not quite so dazed; no semblance of tenderness leeches into her exotic brogue, suddenly harsh and flinty with an almost palpable irritation. "Y-you should not say such things."

"Why not?" And Reinhardt's characteristic gentleness returns at once with a virtually frantic swell of energy. "That would be perfectly impolite, would it not, to fail to offer them our congratulations? Are they not to be wed?"

"They are both women, Reinhardt." A statement of the obvious that bears with it a cruel accusation.

"W-well, yes, I can see that, Jacqueline." If anything, Reinhardt seems a bit exasperated, as if he and Jacqueline are partaking of two tandem conversations that barely intersect.

"Please, it's perfectly fine." Xi Go interrupts, eager to defuse any escalation of these torturously precarious heights of anxiety. "I... I understand that there are those who would think ill of us for-"

"I am not one of them." Reinhardt has rarely been so emphatic; beyond affirming his unyielding adoration for Jacqueline, I don't believe that I've ever witnesses such extraordinary intensity. "Perhaps... Perhaps, years ago, I would have; I would have believed that rotten nonsense about duty and some nebulous, inarticulate morality being more important than love. But, what is more moral than love? You... You and Kimberly are in love, are you not? That is why you wish to be married, isn't it?" Jacqueline wilts beside him, a bold and floridly defiant flower suddenly starved of a nourishing light; she seems truly pitiful, tiny and stricken.

"Yes." Xi Go and I answer at once; my voice quivers with a riotous and irrepressible passion, so intense that I can barely perceive anything but that.

"Yes, we are." Xi Go continues, that brittle arctic control dissolving with a boiling wave of authentic, warm emotion. "Yes, we are."

"I am not blind; I sensed that Kimberly was a great deal more comfortable with you than some unfamiliar suitor, though... I admit that I had not ever quite imagined this." Another quirking smile from Reinhardt. "I am very happy for both of you. I... I had called upon you to apprise you of something wonderful in our lives, as well."

"Oh?" A slightly vacant grin from Xi Go, as she appears to struggle to reconcile herself with Reinhardt's wondrously effortless acceptance.

"But, I... I do not wish to be selfish and impolite; I fear that we have already upset you with our trespass upon such a private moment." Jacqueline remains silent beside Reinhardt, appearing to shrivel within her uniform; slender and delicate shoulders hunch, a miserable flush creeping across cheeks rendered positively pallid with what seems truly to be a grief beyond imagination. Fine fingers interlace, part, and twine again upon the ivory fringe of her raven skirt. At once, without preamble, Reinhardt's larger hand falls upon them; that shivering, tormented fidget halts immediately, slim digits joining with an effortless and silent delight.

"No, you have not. We- we are not upset." Xi Go's eyes dart to my own; I offer her an unsteady smile, gradually shored up with a courage that wells as a truly palpable force within my breast. "We are not upset. Startled, perhaps... But, not upset."

"I am relieved, then."

"I apologize." Jacqueline's words startle me; not merely that she has spoken, but, more disarmingly, the almost infantile fragility of her tone, quivering with a boiling shame and agony from Reinhardt's rebuke. "That was very rude of me. I... I again find myself begging your forgiveness, Miss Kimberly." A beat. "K-Kimberly." A petty periphery of my spirit delights in that; it savors the raw humiliating of her pathetic state, as if that shame will somehow soothe the rending anguish that convulses me at the thought of how cruelly our love will be scorned; it recedes, that subsiding wave dragging away into awful depths that vicious rapture at the first prickling of fine beads of tears amid that sapphire beauty. "I am sorry; I feel so very, very stupid."

"It's... It's perfectly fine." Parroting Xi Go's nonjudgmental geniality has become simpler; I feel that cooling emotional neutrality begin to smother the lingering embers of blazing anger at such sentiments from Jacqueline. "It is." And it truly is; I cannot be angry with her. It strikes me as an epiphany of radiant clarity: whatever hate, whatever disdain, whatever dismissal this love may confront cannot sunder this eternal chain that binds us.

"It is not. I- I do not wish for you to think me backward and... And ignorant. I, of all people, should know that taboos mean so very little when weighed against love. Reinhardt... He and I are leaving; we are fleeing Shanghai." My craving to wail with jubilation, to embrace Jacqueline, seems stillborn as her features remain contorted with such grief.

"Are you? S-should you not be happy for this?"

"We had not believed that we would need to leave so soon." A quiet, dreadful whisper. "I... I know that Miss _Shego_," it's rather remarkable for Jacqueline to pronounce my beloved's name in that cherished manner, "Had counseled us to depart swiftly, but... But everything seemed comfortable for awhile. It- it is not quite so much any longer."

"What has happened? Is- is it Reinhardt's mother?" While I have never experienced the distinct displeasure of her acquaintance, the sole image that I can conjure of this woman is of my own mother; disapproving gazes and a sour scowl, eternally striving to impose her ever-evolving sense of tyrannical morality upon the world.

"No. It- it is not that." Jacqueline remains so dreadfully pallid; Reinhardt has been silent for what feels an eternity, even as she eases nearer and nearer to him, virtually forcing herself upon his lap as if a tormented child.

"What is the matter?" I start as the warmth of Xi Go's hand falls upon my own; a brief flicker of simmering thought interwoven with those glorious, sublimely intimate emotions cascades along our nexus of intertwined jade. I do not understand in any objective manner; there are no words or abstract ideas to guide my conscious mind, but there is little ambiguity as to the welter of peculiar and delicate sensations and sentiments borne with that. "I... I am sorry; I should not pry."

"No." Reinhardt finally speaks; his tone is uncannily deep, vaguely husky, as if he strains to bind a volatile swirl of emotion to his heart. "No, that is quite all right. It- it is wonderful that we finally are departing, even if I had not quite imagined that it would be under these circumstances." Rather than a tentative glance, Reinhardt seems to embrace Jacqueline's gaze with his own; it is as if Xi Go and I, for the moment, do not exist as his larger hands envelop the delicate finery of her own, perhaps as much a maid's as mine are a warrior's. "May... May I tell them? They have been very supportive of us; they have been, despite our brief acquaintanceship, much better friends than anyone we have met."

Jacqueline's reply is merely a mute nod; a subtle and virtually imperceptible inclination of her lovely swanlike neck.

"Jacqueline is with child." I now more fully understand that curious, frail gentleness that writhed through Xi Go's wordless speech to me; enigmatic, powerful, ripe... Maternal. Reinhardt seems to be reeling with a heady and drunken mingling of terror and exhilaration; the thought of his beloved bearing the fruit of their love elevating him to pinnacles triumphant, even as he struggles to cope with the baffling alienness of it. "Isn't- isn't that absolutely magnificent?"

"Congratulations." Words fail anything of such enormity as surely as they do my eternal union with Xi Go. I find myself virtually breathless with a clenching surge of almost irrationally intense emotion at that knowledge; somehow, it fills me with a radiant, riotous elation, particularly as a most singular and foreign, shy smile whispers across Jacqueline's customarily stern and reserved features. "That's- that's absolutely wonderful."

"It is. It is. Truly, completely glorious." He now fulminates with a giddy and childish ecstasy, as if a simmering kettle at long last liberated to soar to a full, rapturous boil. "Yes. We- we have been so happy, and yet we could tell no one. I was certain that you and Miss _Shego _would be as overjoyed as we are."

"You are certain, Jacqueline?" Xi Go's voice remains composed, however suffused with delight she obviously also is.

"I- I am. Absolutely certain. I..." A harsh and distinctly anxious swallow. "I have not for two months, now." A tiny and frail smile, tinged with a truly transparent fear, creases her lips; for a brief instant, I rather wonder if she is quite so elated about their child as Reinhardt.

"Two months? Did you not know sooner?" Xi Go probes; I rather wonder if she is also an experienced physician, amongst her vast constellation of other remarkable talents.

"I could not be sure."

"Are you constant?" Reinhardt and I, for our part, seem to dwell within an entirely separate land, divided from Xi Go and Jacqueline by an impenetrable barrier of language.

"Well... Usually; I am very much sure. We..." Astonishingly, Jacqueline becomes aflame with a bewilderingly vast, florid blush, creeping from the pale fringe of her throat to the peaks of her forehead.

"I see." With a quiet creak of shifting and resettling fabric, Xi Go gently inclines herself forward, seeming to study Jacqueline with an almost disconcerting focus; Jacqueline's flush darkens further, hurtling deftly toward maroon. "And... On unsafe days?"

"I... I suppose so." Little more than a frail ghost of a whisper flits from Jacqueline's lips; she seems ever more mortified with each passing moment.

"I- I do not wish to embarrass you. It... It is merely that anxiety can cause this, as well, and I do not wish for you two to be forced into any premature action for-"

"It is not premature." At once, Reinhardt's voice is of archetypal Teutonic steel. "Even... Even if, somehow, this were not to be, my... Our..." A brief softening of his tone as a powerful gaze flickers to Jacqueline, and again toward Xi go, "Our decision is to leave. This merely spurred us more swiftly; I regret every day that we squandered here in fear and dread. It was stupid of us to ignore you originally; we should have departed that evening. Jacqueline says that she is certain of it; and I am even more certain of the need for us to be away from this.

"It is much too painful now to suffer the... The agony of this ridiculous charade. I love Jacqueline; I love her as my wife, which she will be; I love her as you and Kimberly must love one another. I do not care about anything else; I do not mind being a pauper if it is a matter of embracing love, rather than some gilded prison." And I realize at once why I am also consumed by this strength, this determination to rise beyond the constricting boundaries of mere humanity; why even the frail and retiring Reinhardt can now seem as ferocious as a Goth, raging in battle for what truly matters to him above all else.

"We should help them." I find myself speaking, utterly without thought; without any regard for what commitment that would involve, or what aid we could conceivably render.

"Kimberly?" Xi Go does not appear vexed; merely a bit confused, a fine eyebrow quirked in inquisition.

"H-help us?" Reinhardt also seems positively baffled.

"Well, that is... I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it will be for you, especially if you flee to some foreign land like Japan or America." Which seem as distant and unapproachable as the bottom of the ocean. "I... I have the sense that you're very much like me; I've never been forced to struggle for anything in my entire life until recently. I don't really know what work is, or what it is to be hungry or to labor. We're... I- I do not wish to be affronting, but we, and our families, are very much like children. I, anyway, am used be being taken care of. It- it would frighten me a great deal to suddenly be forced to fend for myself." Despite my newfound strength, I have no doubt whatsoever of that; in Xi Go's absence, I would be as feeble and hopeless as a lamb abandoned amongst wolves.

"I think that you are probably right, Kimberly. But, I will not be daunted; and I do not believe that Jacqueline desires to remain. Do you, my Love?" Jacqueline's lovely and fine features redden again with that; it's remarkable how pale her dusky complexion has seemed, as if that curious tan splendor has begun to leech away with some tortured exhaustion. Reinhardt is luminous as he speaks those words; it's obvious that they have never been liberated to be so intimate in anyone's presence.

"I cannot bear the thought. I told you, Reinhardt: I want to live away from all of this with you."

"So, should we not assist them?" Again, this unreasoning demand that nevertheless seems of the most urgent necessity.

"How would we do so, Kimberly?" A vague, creeping sense of amusement pervades Xi Go's voice, as if this is another of my governess' tests, rather than a matter of the utmost gravity.

"Well... Do you and Jacqueline have a ticket aboard a liner or an aeroplane?" A brief and dismal shake of Reinhardt's head confronts that, that curious mane tousled and tortured with the jarring and abrupt movement.

"This has been very spontaneous, hasn't it?" Xi Go seems to be affirming the obvious with an almost adversarial intensity. I rather wonder for what reason she behaves so sternly with them.

"I... I suppose so. We have been preparing our things in secret; bags to be swept away with us in the night. But, well... It is not as if either of us can travel freely; the footmen are my mother's spies, and the chauffeur is as beholden to me as he would be to a beggar." Reinhardt is obviously tormented by this; by that sense of utter helplessness, as if he enjoys no control whatsoever over the course of his life, drawn along by invisible currents that seem to tug him inexorably toward destinations unfathomed and undesired. My empathy for that is absolute; I would have simply drowned amid that babbling torrent, submerged by my own anguish at the utter futility of such a vain life.

"So, could we not help them with that? I am certain that we could do something." Ever so helpfully, my supreme ambition does not yet extend to any coherent conception of what that something would be.

"Yes, I suppose that we could." Pityingly, Xi Go indulges me at long last.

"How?" Reinhardt's incredulity, however understandable, frustrates me to an unbearable extreme.

"Well, I... I am sure that _Shego_ and I could steal away to the port and buy a ticket for you; and we have a chauffeur." A beat as I ponder how patently ridiculous that seems. "And, there are many taxis in Shanghai, aren't there?"

"Yes. Yes, I suppose so." Despite my most fervent, virtually desperate effort to be helpful, Reinhardt appears distinctly less than convinced.

"I..." There's little doubt of why this furious impulse has stricken me with such searing intensity. I yearn, I pine, I burn to be away from this fantastical garden menagerie, this surreal, dual world of pretension and truth, in which I remain the feeble Kimberly Dmitriovna for the sake of my parents, paralyzed by an ignorant unworldiness, even as I am Xi Go's lover, the heir to a transcendental soul, guided by our eternal and unwavering love. I am a warrior, and I am a child; a mere girl and a woman more ancient than can be imagined. I cannot bear the thought of sustaining this delusion for a moment further; their liberation seems somehow a window upon a distant, blissful future for us, as well.

"Yes, Kimberly?" Xi Go's reply is one of supremely gentle encouragement, however supremely dubious she obviously is, as well.

"I... I desperately wish to be helpful, and I feel perfectly foolish for having so little notion of what to actually offer. I- I haven't anything, I suppose, aside from a few vague and childish fancies; I don't even have any money of my own." Which is a truly supreme irony; the daughter of amongst Russia's most prosperous families cannot claim even a single ruble for herself, beyond a few trinkets, heirlooms, and an extraordinary wealth of gowns likely, shamefully, costlier than the average worker's salary.

"That... That is rather our problem, as well." A quiet and decidedly dismal murmur from Reinhardt. "I- I do receive a stipend from my parents." That settles over us with a ringing sense of maudlin humor; we are children. Even the meanest laborer nevertheless controls their modest means; even they bear the starvation wages inflicted upon them. "This seems so awful; so impossible. But, what are we to do?"

"I..." My lips contort with a wrenching scowl as my mind drifts to my one possession of any true value. "I could sell something." Those words emerge as a feeble and dismal whisper.

"No, we- we couldn't expect that of you." Reinhardt protests without hesitation; whether as a matter of politeness, or masculine pride, or genuine concern for me, he nevertheless is fiercely emphatic.

"But, we... We've been prodding you all this time. It's- it's just a brush, really." A singularly precious remnant of that blissful naïvete of childhood, warped bristles and glorious gilded splendor imbued with innumerable poignant memories. By contrast with another's true, enduring happiness, however, it is merely a lump of gold and horsehair; I nevertheless feel my chest tighten with a raw and cringing anxiety.

"That's ridiculous." Xi Go finally interrupts, rupturing the weighty and excruciating pall of silence that's tumbled upon us. "Absolutely ludicrous. You will have no need to sell that brush, Kimberly; you and Jacqueline will not be reliant upon whatever stipend that he has received." If anything, my lover seems more than slightly amused, as if the whole of these melodramatics are little more than children's exaggerated theatrics.

"W-what do you mean?" That emerges as a startled gurgle, as if reality has abruptly begun to shift at her impetus.

"Have you forgotten that I am not a child?" She offers that pearl of wisdom with a bewildering vast grin that inspires a positively mortified welter of crimson across our cheeks; the sense of a staggering gap in maturity, in worldliness, in simple economics is suddenly overwhelming. "I have money, Kimberly." A brief, delicately grazing caress along my arm, a seething arc of rapturous electricity coruscating across me at that sublime contact, affirms that I should not feel too terribly silly. "A great deal of it; more than I could possibly need." Which, I suppose, would be true; what cause has a true immortal for anything so frivolous and temporal as material indulgences?

"M-miss _Shego_, I couldn't possibly-"

"Yes, you will." My lover interrupts Reinhardt's stammer with a sudden and unyielding intensity. "Yes, you will accept my charity, or I fear that we will be having this torturous conversation again and again until Jacqueline gives birth." An image which seems to dissolve any misgivings about such a less than regal notion. "Your parents will not be pleased, will they?"

"T-they would kill me for certain." Horrifically, Jacqueline does not seem to speak with any inordinate hyperbole; Reinhardt's sudden, tortured stillness, the utter, thundering void of reassuring whispers, seems to affirm that something so terrible could be true. "P-perhaps not his father, but... His mother- she, she could not bear the thought of..." Of another controversy with a maid; another child born to one of a lower class, beyond the sanctity of marriage.

"I see." A deliberate and emphatic nod from Xi Go. "Then, it is decided; we will see you off at the port as soon as possible." And it is decided; it seems as if that command electrifies the whole of us into sudden, furious action, an electric excitement overtaking me.

"That's wonderful, Reinhardt." It truly is; a smile unfolds across my lips as if a luminous, livid blossom. "That's glorious. You and Jacqueline- you'll be able to begin your lives together. I hope only that we will see you. Will..." A pensive pause. "Will you be able to write to us when you arrive safely?" I have no notion if we will even be within this surreal garden any longer, truly.

"Of course." Jacqueline appears dazed and startlingly colorless; Reinhardt is alight with a positively absurd grin that illuminates his features as if he stands beneath the sun in its full, blazing fury. "I should hope so. We... We will write you at the soonest available opportunity. Perhaps we may telegraph you." A novelty for which I have never cared; the abstract, impersonal abruptness is absolutely insufferable, regardless of its immediacy.

"When you and Jacqueline are prepared, I ask that you call upon us that morning; we will escort you to the harbor." Xi Go patiently instructs, for the moment the sole adult amongst us. I should be positively mortified to be this directionlessly giddy, this hopelessly infantile, but I cannot restrain it; I feel a molten rapture swell within my heart at the thought of Reinhardt and Jacqueline pursuing their lives together, straining against the cruel adversity that has beset them so heartlessly. "Be sure that you are very discreet."

"O-of course." A vigorous nod, as if anything so obvious is a directive of the utmost intricacy and import. "Yes, of course."

"And, please, do color Jacqueline's cheeks. Is she not eating?"

"I... I'm beginning to feel ill." A queasy and dismal flicker of a smile. "Very ill in the mornings. I- I can barely do my duties; and I fear that the other maids may not believe that I have been so long stricken with some terrible flu, even when I feel so feverish."

"I fear to tell you that it will only become worse. But, salt will calm that; douse everything with it. I should think that you will begin to crave it, in any event."

"I... I have this bizarre yearning for eggs, but the thought of eating them makes me horrendously sickly." Jacqueline's voice dips to a pathetic whisper, as if this is some dreadfully awful and mortifying confession. "Do you know of this, Miss _Shego_?"

"I have had a great many professions; I was once a midwife's apprentice, and I know of the cycles of conception and birth." Which does not startle me in the slightest. Xi Go has elucidated merely a tiny fraction of the peculiar occupations that she has held, and the whole of them have been bewilderingly eclectic, from the banal to the absolutely transcendental. "I cannot claim that a longing for eggs is that common, but I would council you not to ignore any of your cravings." A wry grin plays across her lips. "It is said by some that your child will have a birthmark in the shape of whatever you are denied."

"I... I should hope that Jacqueline will not want for anything." An affirmation of the utmost, blustering pride from Reinhardt as I earnestly wonder by what means he will support his future bride. "I have no compunction about selling everything of value to me for her sake; and I have a great many silly little trinkets that hold no meaning to me; they are more a symbol of imprisonment than anything of value, valuable as they may be."

"Reserve that for wherever you are going, then. Have you decided?"

"Japan seems as if it would be promising." A sincere and contemplative reply. "Its economy, I have heard, is flourishing; and the Japanese have become very civilized, and very powerful." Merely the vaguest suggestion of Xi Go's signature, vacant smile forms upon my lips at such an utterance; I now grasp the utter folly of such bewildering ignorance and judgment, and simply ignore it, even as I revolt at such a thought. "I am sure that they will have need for draftsmen. The Germans also hold a bit of influence there, I understand, and I believe that it is growing again."

"I see." Xi Go does not seem to be urging them toward that curious land, or discouraging them. "Then it will be a briefer journey."

"Yes. Yes, exactly. And, I am very handy with languages; Jacqueline is quite skilled, as well." Reinhardt burbles enthusiastically, virtually lunging from his seat with the sheer enormity of the exuberant energy coursing through him. "We- I think that we will be fine. I know that we will be. I... I only wish that this were not needed; that our family would understand us." It's rather a tragic truth that, for so many betrayals, Reinhardt's family is also Jacqueline's; however perniciously they have abused her, however cruelly they have demeaned her, her father is also his.

"As do I." That whisper is drenched with a sudden and sullen melancholy; the renewed certitude that my family would be equally, brutally intolerant as Reinhardt's, if not more so, douses a soaring bird with a buffeting rain, its brilliant flight transitioning to a pitiful tumble. "As... As do I."

"But, surely..." Reinhardt obviously understands; no insincere platitudes could conceivably conceal that one fundamental fact. "I... I wish that it were not all so complicated. For- for all of us. I know that... That our taboo is not as obvious as yours, but- but it still feels as if, if anyone knew, they would hate us as powerfully as they would you." A brief and tortured pause. "I do not understand; and I feel positively terrible for being exultant when you now must worry."

"Kimberly and I will be fine." Xi Go is obviously consoling me; the delicate warmth of her fingers laced around my own tenses to a virtually crushing pressure, ensuring that there is no doubt of her conviction. "We will be fine. China is more accepting of... Of our love; of a love between women."

"Is it? I- I never knew that." With the awkward and increasingly ashen cast of his fine features, it's obvious that Reinhardt is desperately uncomfortable, even as he struggles to maintain a facade of easy and untroubled casualness.

"What... What do you call it?" Jacqueline's interruption rather astonishes me; I suppose that I've never devoted any thought to it, either. Xi Go is my lover; she is my Xi Go, and I am her Kimberly. We... We are, I suppose, to be woman and woman, rather than man and woman, but it does not seem as if there is any other meaningful difference. "I... I have only heard it called sodomy... It is not spoken of very highly; I am afraid that I have just accepted that without thought, even knowing how wonderful you and Kimberly are. I still worry that I have offended you." I, too, have heard that word; whispered with a transparently cruel malice in discreet circumstances; the topic of scurrilous rumors designed to shatter another's reputation. It occurs to me now that those had likely not been mere rumors, and that such words are more devastatingly awful than I could ever have believed.

"You have not, Jacqueline." Xi Go answers unhesitatingly for both of us; she does not permit me a single word, even as I continue to feel a galling sense of upset at even that thoughtless and unwitting suggestion of scorn. "Do not worry. That... That is a foreign concept to China; only recently has anyone thought of even describing it as something so specific. Men have always been allowed to take other men as lovers; it is simply a part of life, particularly for those of wealth and means, so long as one does one's duty, as prescribed by Kongzi.

"I suppose that I have never even thought of it any other way; most do not speak of it as anything but a great friendship. Many think that men can have only such deep relationships with other men, in fact; one such person of great power and influence who cared only for his male companions was Emperor Ai."

"But... But, you are not men." Another statement of the blatantly obvious from Reinhardt. In recent weeks, I have learned that women do not enjoy any meaningful status amongst the Chinese; that, largely, they are invisible, property, or merely wives and bearers of children; nothing is thought of their minds and spirits by most.

"Men do not talk of women, and men are those who write histories and codes of morality." Xi Go, if anything, seems vaguely amused by what galls at me with its loathsome familiarity; that callous and chauvinistic dismissal of women as less than insignificant, as being beneath mere notice unless she is a queen. Even then, she is deemed monstrous for her power. "But, on occasion, a few wealthy and independent women have relationships called _dui shi_; it is a marriage, even as..." Any congenial and oblique niceties evaporate at what, with this wondrous and divine nexus, I know is a welling of unutterable grief and frustration, "Disgracefully, they are not accorded the status granted to men in similar union."

"I... I see." A pensive smile raises a slight flicker of color into Jacqueline's features. "Is there a ceremony? I... I know that it probably seems silly, but I have dreamt of a wedding with Reinhardt since we were younger; I yearn to be his bride. I should- I should think that you and Kimberly are much the same."

"There are ceremonies." And I have no doubt that she speaks of a truly glorious occasion, even one alien to my sense of a wedding.

"Then... That- that is wonderful." Whatever Jacqueline's true opinion, if any, in the matter, she brandishes an expression of the utmost glee, despite her ashen pallor.

"I hope that I do not seem rude, but you do not look well, Jacqueline." Dismayingly, she does not; she has remained so achingly pale, despite such a wondrous litany of developments.

"I- I know that I don't. I hope that I'm still beautiful enough for Reinhardt." A remark that attracts an immediate furrowing of his brows, his arms lacing at once around her slim shoulders; the contrast of their complexions nevertheless accentuates precisely how dark she is, even with color leeched so distressingly from her.

"That's perfectly silly, Jacqueline; I should fear for not being handsome enough for you." And they simply nestle together, as Xi Go and I do. I realize, quite suddenly, how... How unaccountably comfortable this is; how natural and wonderful it is to be amid such complete and unfettered love. I cannot recall ever having once confronted this sense of singular ease and contentment; even my parents at their most vividly passionate seemed encumbered by a distance that I now know I had merely vaguely intuited, however perfect their union seemed.

Wondrously, we merely sit in an unhurried silence; my mind wanders of its own accord, tracing through vast tracts of fantasies past and present, realizing how profoundly empty and unambitious my yearnings had been in what seems a gauzy void in my remembrance. It's as if my fears have been confirmed in the most glorious manner possible; that, while the return of this glorious soul to its fullest zenith has not erased the occupant of this body, those cruel and pathetic vestiges of a past life, a flawed life, as Kimberly Dmitriovna have begun to recede into a distant darkness. It has not been cruelly obliterated by that renewed welling of my enduring spirit, but rather simply forced into invisibility by contrast with the radiant majesty of this present.

It's a state of near-slumber, simply luxuriating in my beloved's presence; savoring the curious and almost animal lassitude of this moment of uncommon comfort, of having been divested of these barriers preserved to coddle the heartless and bestial sensibilities of others. I realize that I now entertain a fervent desire to join Reinhardt and Jacqueline; to partake of their liberation, even as I know that our destiny lies here, that a life beyond this land that seems to have fastened my very spirit to its soil with fierce and irresistible tendrils of supernatural power is impossible.

Abruptly, jarringly, a thundering resound of the mildest of torturously timid raps upon the door shatters this calm reverie; the monstrous reality of duty, of family, of responsibility... Of these abhorrent and unnatural pretensions sustained for the sake of others... That pernicious untruth, that living apparition that has become more urgent and real than our actual lives, arises again; a hideous revenant resurrected from its momentary burial by the arrival of one uninitiated into this private splendor.

It erupts again, a deafening reverberation of that crushing weight of duty; its shearing awfulness succeeds in what no other brutality, no other depredation, could achieve, sundering Jacqueline and Reinhardt, returning husband and wife to the hideous distance of master and servant; it even divides Xi Go and me, my hand slipping from hers as if the tumbling of a stricken swallow to a silent and purposeless death.

Finally, a jarring click of a bolt and the gentle creak of a swaying door separates us entirely; I feel myself lurching to my feet with a jolting adroitness, narrowing my eyes against a blazing arc of lightning that seems virtually a presence unto itself, dancing with a golden mischief across the black skies.

And, as that blinding presence vanishes, I confront a distant specter; breath hitches with a straining, cruel tension in my chest; an arid agony lunges into my throat; my lips are convulsed with a fearful tremor. Dark eyes confront me; features, fine and beautiful, are frozen in an impassive mask of indifference; a sleek, beauteous chestnut braid trails along a slender shoulder, brushed away with an apathetic stroke of a pale hand. A sudden, wailing panic wells into my mind; it divests me of every trace of reason, cruel, barbed tendrils shearing through what was once clear and limpid.

I am terrified; her mere presence horrifies me, as if some unspeakable nightmare rendered flesh; that full, gentle softness seems to be the pale grace of the _rusalka_.

"_Mister Gyoldman's_," I realize that Maria speaks in English, however harshly inflected, "_Parents have asked him to return with his maid at once_." As she addresses us, however, Maria's severe gaze remains fixed upon me; they blaze with an icy fury, lashing at me with a torturous and palpable accusation. Upon delivering that message, she remains at the door, as if daring me to approach; I can feel the hate rippling from within her as if a presence unto itself. It feels as if she's been possessed by a wraith, consumed by a beast of unimaginable cruelty that directs her lacerating stare with deliberate and unimaginable malice.

"_I see_." Even Reinhardt seems to register that something is profoundly awry with Maria; I have no doubt that it is Maria. I now realize that more than merely a distinctive ribbon distinguishes the sisters; a tangible spirit writhes within her, bared before a sight that transcends merely physical awareness. With a deep, almost unconscious breath, I feel that alignment again as if an intuitive defense against that shuddering terror; a faintness overtakes me, my knees virtually buckling beneath a suddenly unendurable weight as I become more powerfully aware of what lies within her.

It is... It is not even hate; it eclipses anything so prosaic, so fundamentally human. A monstrous and misshapen core, a warped and bestial nature, has taken root within her; it boils and heaves, lashing out with the fury of an uncoiling serpent, an apparition in sickly azure. It is anguish made manifest; a screaming, wailing torture that has become ever more distorted in its intensity with time; it is rage cooled to its iciest and most inhumane essence, a liquid brutality that is beyond anything I could ever have visualized.

And, at its center, is a sorrow that I could never have envisaged lying beneath her tender smiles and wondrous, nurturing warmth; a sobbing, whimpering, animal fear and grief that raises a true sickness into my heart. A terrible wound has festered irrevocably into something truly evil, and I now fear that it is my fault; that I have inflicted some awful suffering upon her. Without a single word, she departs, even as that molten malice lingers in her wake, seeming to snap at me with accusing jaws; dead eyes continue to burn into my mind, even as I struggle to restrain the tears of pure terror and misery that threaten to lunge into my own.

"Kimberly?" My attention remains riveted to the lingering vestiges of that impossible visitation; that presence that endures even in her wake, as if a taint that pervades the air itself with its liquid cruelty. "Kimberly?" Even Xi Go's tender, dulcet tones fail to rupture this captivation, this awful enrapturement; azure fire continues to writhe across my sight as if a living evil, searing itself ever more deeply and indelibly into my otherwise sightless and unseeing eyes.

"Kimberly? Are you all right?" Fierce and insistent, a sudden heat finally shatters this horrific thrall; settling upon my hand, it coruscates through my body with a molten presence of its own, displacing that overpowering and truly supernatural terror. The voice does not belong to the hand; deep and pensive, I cannot identify it with the supple tenderness of that caress.

"I... E-excuse me?" And the European chambers finally resolve into their proper, stifling pomp and banality with an aching clarity; odious and unremarkable expanses of ivory transitioning to tiresome, bleached white; the glimmering, dancing presence of innumerable diamond shards of light playing along bland wallpaper.

"You... You seemed distracted, Kimberly." Reinhardt is beside me; he and Jacqueline have predictably risen as one, a single entity of paired hearts and joined hands. She appears positively ashen, her complexion a cadaverous pallor; ordinarily voluptuous and crimson lips are drawn and trembling, utterly colorless.

"I... It's nothing." How am I to explain Maria to Reinhardt and Jacqueline? How am I to articulate those nebulous but truly terrible senses of unfathomable evil throbbing from within her, of that familiar and nightmarish aura that defies human perception? How am I to justify claiming to have glimpsed a monster where there stood merely a beauteous maid?

Xi Go's hand, however, fastens upon mine with a renewed steadfastness; I can feel the trembling pressure of her slender fingers intertwined with my own, a singular trepidation and palpable anxiety rippling through that jade nexus.

"Are you certain? You look like you've seen a ghost." Perhaps I have.

"Oh, no... It's- it was just an odd sense for a brief moment. I have these strange episodes on occasion." I offer a thoroughly unconvincing lie, overcome with relief when Reinhardt embraces it without any further interrogation.

"I... I see." His reply accentuates a total incredulity that forces into further, tortured definition that desperate pining within my breast for it to be truth; for everything merely to be a peculiar delusion, a brief lapse of reality that will restore everything to a familiar normality with its passage.

"Is anything the matter, Jacqueline?" I'm certain that my visage is very much a facsimile of her own; she blanches further, truly spectral, as if overcome by an unutterable horror. "You... You don't look well, as impolite as that may be to say."

"I'm afraid." Those words emerge as a dismal and anguished whisper, convulsed with a hellish tremor that accentuates how ridiculous it is for me to quake with this awful terror at Maria's visitation, however unbelievably awful that presence that seemed to lay within her may have been. Whether rage or possession, Maria is nevertheless but a maid; Jacqueline exists at every instant with a horrific and urgent menace to her very being, to that glorious union with Reinhardt.

"F-for what reason?" Beyond the obvious, I don't quite understand why she would now be consumed with such overwhelming fear.

"I... I have been struggling to avoid his parents; I've pretended that I don't even exist. They don't even acknowledge me." Her exotic and gentle tone virtually warbles with a raw agony.

"I... I don't understand."

"They ordinarily just order about Reinhardt." Jacqueline is at once convulsed with an anxious energy that raises a sickly and terrible lividity to her cheeks. "I... I know that it must seem perfectly stupid to you, but even knowing that they included me with that makes me desperately afraid. I'm terrified that they'll notice suddenly how ashen I seem, that I... That I haven't been eating well; that I've been sick every morning. If they knew about Reinhardt and me, they... They..." Ordinarily staid shards of pale aquamarine dissolve into quivering pools; she's consumed by furious, quaking tremors, seemingly mad with an indescribable horror.

Even Reinhardt is frozen with bafflement until a low and keening whimper issues from her throat, finally fastening his arms around the slender wisp of her waist; she's folded against his slight form as if a child, and I realize how fragile and tiny she now appears against a man that she virtually dwarfed with her sheer presence. She shudders in his grasp as anguished, wracking sobs, stifled with a fervent and seemingly superhuman effort, seep from the very depths of her soul.

Xi Go and I remain silent and distant observers, occupying another plane of existence entirely as we stand beside them; neither of us even draw breath, beholding this torment, feeling her raw and swollen grief resonate through our souls, as well. That desperation is almost unfathomable; her suffering is a tangible presence, unfurling as if some diseased and awful flower, petals of susurrating, electric agony scouring through the vermillion tenderness of a pure soul. I know that I do not merely see her with mortal eyes; nor does Xi Go, her gaze flickering with a gentle emerald gleam as I offer a strained smile of the utmost helplessness to her.

Jacqueline is now bawling in his arms, as if ordeal upon ordeal, insult upon insult, have accumulated without relief within her; a pool of turbid and shuddering emotions welling above its banks, spilling forth in the liquid currents of her tears. Reinhardt's words are unable to stanch that relentless torrent, whispered with an aching gentleness, as if to a frightened animal.

"Jacqueline... Please, please... Don't be afraid. Nothing will happen. Nothing." He repeats this, again and again, a relentless mantra that falls upon the deaf ears of his goddess.

"They'll send me away." Jacqueline wails. Her voice has risen to a startlingly shrill and fragile pitch, crushing herself to her lover; he virtually buckles beneath the immensity of a sudden and extraordinary strength that I can truly see boiling from within her. It's a furious scarlet flame fed by a sense of urgent and unimaginable pain; Xi Go tugs me nearer to the door, finally fastening both of us against it, as if their sentries. "They'll send me away, Reinhardt! I haven't even seen... Even seen..." That unutterable sorrow dissolves into incoherent, wracking cries.

"Jacqueline, I promise you that it could never happen. Never. We-we're leaving soon, aren't we? If they were to try to send you away, then-"

"Then your mother would kill me." Her sobs become nearly a scream, soaring to a howling zenith of directionless fear and agony. "She would kill me, Reinhardt. She- I know that she would. I have not seen my mother... My mother once since she was forced away; and your mother has left me no doubt about what would become of me if..." It's as if Jacqueline has fainted while upright, words dissolving into a murmuring stream of tormented whimpers before receding into a wrenching silence; even as she trembles, devoured by the passionate enormity of his embrace, it is as if she has vanished.

"I'm so sorry, Jacqueline... I... We should have left ages ago." His murmur is of the utmost resignation, an aching and wretched sorrow welling into private tones intended solely for Jacqueline. I can feel that tortured sense of helplessness, of utter impotence, of a singular and ineffectual, childish incapacity to rescue his love, a light that illuminates an otherwise absolute and intolerable darkness. It's horrific to witness, with such seemingly benign words, soaring, exultant joy warped into unimaginable grief; his voice tumbles to a positively hopeless whisper as he continues. "Perhaps... Perhaps it would have been better if-"

"Be silent, Reinhardt." The jagged ferocity of Xi Go's speech, a savage and snapping welter of rage that blazes through this bleary and terrible mist of almost coherent, electric anxiety. "Be silent."

"But, I-"

"If you speak those words, Jacqueline will never again be able to fully trust you, in your love; in your very devotion to her that she will need to carry both of you through this. However powerfully you may feel responsible for this, you must understand that your love is not yours alone; she adores you as powerfully as you do her, and she is as fiercely committed to this as you. Even in a moment of fear, you cannot say something so dreadful."

"How... How did you know what I'd intended to say?" I, too, wonder, even as, with our hearts and souls so powerfully and inextricably interwoven, the answer looms powerfully within that peculiar and nebulous higher wisdom.

"I am not a fool, Reinhardt." Xi Go's sternness does not recede. Again, she as if my governess, and his own; a ferocious and recriminating adulthood that looms above us in our thrall of enduring childhood, struggling into some reasonable facsimile of maturity. We have been sheltered and insulated; the revelations of these recent weeks, I increasingly realize cannot quite purge every trace of that singular naïvete and hopeless ignorance. I know that Reinhardt and I are very much alike, despite this ancient and enduring spirit that writhes within me; the truly palpable fear and mortification that shudders in tortured currents across his features is echoed within my own breast.

"But, I-"

"Please, do not lie to me. Never, ever utter those words; even in moments of the utmost weakness, when you believe that Jacqueline is deaf with deep and complete slumber, do not ever permit them to leave your lips as the quietest whisper. She will hate you, and you will hate yourself." My lover's voice is utterly leaden, as if that supreme, agonizing certainty issues forth from some unspeakable core of grief; I know, upon some distant and intuitive level, with a truth vibrating to a measure beyond my mind's immediate understanding, that it must be.

"I- I understand." Even if he does not, his soul shudders with a primal terror and awe in her presence; his fear is a quivering pond churned by a hurricane, driven to mad peaks of senselessness by this terrible strength that I feel again with such enormity.

"I hope that you do, Reinhardt." Xi Go now clasps me jealously to her chest; her powerful, sleek arms envelop me, virtually crushing me against her blissfully fragrant, yielding warmth. I feel as if I am truly a child again; she seems to dwarf me with the sheer immensity of her presence, of a spirit that wells above the constraints of her mere body; a shadow of pure, shimmering luminosity, soaring above the whole of us. "I hope that you do."

"I'm sorry. I- I don't know what came over me. It- it was perfectly stupid of me to even think that. You must be a clairvoyant, Miss _Shego_." Reinhardt has reverted to an almost comfortably familiar awkwardness, seeming to babble without the slightest kernel of thought in a struggle to erode this torturous and shivering unease.

"I have lived for a very long time." My lover replies with virtually a laconic air, as if three centuries would qualify merely as a long time; it seems an impossible eternity.

"I... I see. I would never have envisioned that." Startlingly, Jacqueline seems to slumber upright in his arms, as if she has not known the gentle embrace of sleep for an aching eternity. "I... I suppose that we should be away, but-"

"Is Jacqueline not sleeping, Reinhardt?" I'm astounded by the blazing flush that Xi Go's wholly innocuous question inspires; a livid and angry serpent of vermillion that slithers across his pale features.

"W-what do you mean? I... I don't know what-" Unaccountably, it's as if he has returned to the exaggerated, cringe-inducing, thoughtless geniality of our introduction; unworldly, awkward, stammering as he seems to struggle with even the simplest words. A quirking smile of the utmost bewilderment creeps across my lips; I can only visualize a reindeer upon ice.

"She is pregnant with your child, Reinhardt; please, do not think me daft. Are you not sleeping with one another?" Xi Go is less amused. I've the sense that she feels a curiously maternal responsibility for both of them; perhaps they reflect for her a moment of our own past, and a means of redressing some terrible, unfathomable mistake.

"Yes... Yes, of course." And his infantile struggling recedes again, that naïve, jumbled awkwardness transitioning anew to a sullen exhaustion. "I... I am still so timid about such things. You must understand that I am English." He seems torn between a dismal exasperation and an odd, self-deprecating amusement; I feel myself tilting inexorably toward outright hilarity at such a thought. "Jacqueline and I... We, um... We have been intimate. Often." I've a peculiar and almost visceral swelling of aversion to that; I've barely the slightest inkling of what it involves, beyond a few ambiguous and whispered euphemisms from more knowledgeable girls, but it's a bit challenging to envision what allure lies in so cumbersome and graceless a creature as a man. Jacqueline, however, obvious sees what I cannot; her comfort is absolute in his fragile embrace, nestled against his chest as if a child.

"Do you not also sleep together?" Xi Go repeats.

"When we can. It... It is very difficult, you understand; the servants are not beholden to me. My mother terrorizes them; they legitimately fear for their positions unless they report everything to her. She is a terrible and dreadful tyrant, and is most abusive with the maids."

"Does she rest well with you?"

"I... Not constantly, no." A glum mutter. "She still is consumed by fear at the thought of being discovered. She often awakes with terrible and convulsive nightmares; sometimes, she is unable to sleep, and I lie awake with her. Is- is this a part of her... Her condition?"

"Sleeplessness can be. There... There will be a great many changes; she may be melancholy at once instant, and rapturous at the next. Do not," a brief and pensive pause, "Do not expect anything, I suppose."

"You have seen this often?"

"More often than you would probably believe." Another laconic murmur. "It is remarkable that she sleeps so soundly in your arms."

"We love one another, Miss _Shego_. As- as strongly as you and Kimberly, I am certain." I feel very much as if I'm a particularly adored teddy bear in her arms; much as Reinhardt clutches Jacqueline to his chest as if a life preserver amid buffeting waves, so too does Xi Go hold me.

"I should hope so."

"We... We should be away. As much as I loathe to wake her, my parents are not patient; my mother, in particular. We- we absolutely cannot give her any cause for suspicion."

"Is she that suspicious of you and Jacqueline?"

"I fear so, Miss _Shego_. Ever since my father's..." As deeply as he resents and rages against his mother, it is obviously that Reinhardt reserves the bulk of his hatred for his father. "Ever since his dalliances, ever since she discovered Jacqueline's parentage, she has despised and resented her. And... And, I quite suspect, she thinks me of similar sensibilities. But, this- this is not some wretched and dirty tryst. Perhaps he did love Jacqueline's mother; I very much hope so. But, I wish to spend my entire life with Jacqueline; with Jacqueline alone. I am not some dreadful philanderer." It's remarkable how deftly he speaks, and with such decisiveness; it seems nearly as if his characteristic stumbling is a well-honed facade, receding whenever the true essence of his spirit wells forth in these moments of extraordinary candor.

"That's very honorable, Reinhardt."

"I..." His tone dips further, emerging as an anguished sigh. "I know that I have a great deal for which to atone. Jacqueline and I have... We have been in love for years; I have been so foolish, so stupid, as to allow myself to capitulate to fear, to defer the day at which we could truly be together merely for this ridiculous life. I- I was complacent. We loved one another, and she protested so often that she could endure this charade, that we should both be comfortable; but she was only being selfless, and I so shamefully selfish.

"She has always protected me this way, you understand." His dark gaze alights with a liquid and shimmering adoration; slender and curiously feminine fingers graze with proprietary tenderness across the fine, willowy delicacy of her neck, combing through lustrous locks with truly a lover's affection. "I have always been the one to be weak, to beg for her aid, for her indulgence in everything. Now, I must be strong, mustn't I? I would rather die than see her away; I would rather die than allow her to suffer this for a moment further."

"You are becoming a man, Reinhardt." That seems to electrify him, as if the flattery of the divine.

"I never believed that I would hear that from you." Despite the seeming drollness of his words, Reinhardt is a paragon of utter, intense ingenuousness; he appears genuinely astonished, his voice level and features steeled with a severe edge.

"Oh?"

"I... I knew that you did not particularly care for me; from the very instant I arrived, I could sense that you hated me. Or, at the least, that you had as much fondness for me as a stray animal. I realize that it was because you were as afraid as Kimberly... Indeed, as afraid as I was, of whatever this farce of a courtship could involve. I have been very childish, and I do not think that I am deserving of your praise, much less your respect; I have caused Jacqueline a great deal of pain with my indecisiveness and childishness."

"And that is why I think that you're growing into a true adult, Reinhardt." I can sense the luminous splendor of Xi Go's smile; an image of the utmost, beatific majesty filters into my thoughts, even as I find myself riveted curiously to Reinhardt and Jacqueline. They seem a mirror of us; I yearn to be as powerful, as stern and committed, as Reinhardt; I hope with a desperation that I could never articulate that I will be as fiercely devoted as he is.

"Thank you, Miss _Shego_." A further instant of silence seems to dilate into a blissfully calm eternity, until a severe and almost ostentatious intake of breath shears through its pleasant stillness. "I think that we should be going. You- you will, I suppose, see us once again."

"I should hope so. And soon, Reinhardt." Xi Go admonishes; it's rather a pleasure to witness his cheeks flush again with that resurgent awkwardness in the presence of my lover.

"Of course." And, with a tortured, grudging murmur, Reinhardt's hands delicately glide along the dusky softness of Jacqueline's skin toward her cheeks; they seem to vanish amid an extraordinary fall of chestnut locks, downy and quietly rustling with an achingly tender caress. "Jacqueline? Jacqueline? Are you awake?"

"Mmm?" For once, I've a glimpse of Jacqueline utterly without extremes of stolid reserve or quivering, unreasoning fear; a low and husky groan of drowsiness seeps from between them, virtually childish in its quiet vexation. "Reinhardt, it's too early."

"Will you awaken, my Love?" I rather wonder if I've ever been so grudging with Xi Go, consumed by an infantile yearning to return to that blissful and unworried oblivion of slumber.

"I'm- I'm awake." She barely seems to be, even upright. I'm astonished that his slight strength can actually support her with such unwavering focus; perhaps it is his love that energizes him beyond the resilience of his fragile body. "I am. W-where are we?" She does not part from him; he will not allow it, even as a subtle tension seems to ripple through her with a sudden awareness of their circumstances.

"It's all right, my Love; we're with Kimberly and Miss _Shego_. You must simply have fallen asleep in my arms; you've been very tired lately." It's rather peculiar to be witness to such unrestrained intimacy between them, as if Xi Go and I, for the moment, again do not exist. His voice virtually throbs with unhesitating, unrestrained love for her; I can truly perceive it in tangible, shuddering currents that envelop them in whirling and eddying sheets of scarlet.

"I have been." And, torturously, they part; with glacial, agonizing deliberateness, slender limbs drift from their true and rightful perches; his hands fall cruelly from her cheeks, as her own do from his shoulders. Their true souls are, in a transformation that fills me with a grief indescribable in its familiar misery, forced beneath the turbid waters of some fictitious and abominable obligation. Once again, fingers slipping away, they are maid and master; colorless and of an unyielding, icy impassiveness, they depart without another word.

So powerfully does the grief flood from beneath that bestial facade that I feel as if my own body will crumble; I wish to grieve for them, to rage and scream and raise my voice in a yowling, wailing dirge for the death of such a transcendental spirit, smothered by their burdens. Their love remains at the core of that shivering and terrible aura of sorrow, but I fear that even such a glorious and untarnished splendor may ultimately succumb to that crushing, suffocating force. A horrid, simmering mist wells of its own accord before my sight as the door finally closes behind them; that sudden percussion of wood and the click of a latch that seems to roar with the fury of some evil god.

"Kimberly." I remain fastened desperately to Xi Go, reeling with the utter and unfathomable enormity of the emotions that career through me unbidden. "Kimberly?"

"Yes, _Shego_?" It would be impossible to force even the vaguest suggestion of normality into my trembling voice.

"You felt it, as well?" Xi Go is equally dismayed, even as her tone is simply of a hollow, level solemnity.

"Yes." That word, harsh and hot, emerges as a tortured whisper from my lips. "Yes. I... I cannot believe what I felt, what I saw."

"That is a terrible onus of this power, if you choose to live." I cannot be content with anything so cryptic.

"What do you mean?"

"_Xian_ can decide merely to drift away from humanity, to cast away every trapping of mortality as if an inconvenient garment. Emotions and the spirit can be discarded as surely as one would unwanted refuse, but one must embrace nothing but that power, wholly without reserve or restraint. It... It is..."

"It's terrible." As wrenchingly awful as it is to confront such a tangible and terrible embodiment of their grief, tormenting me as if a living presence, I cannot even begin to envision a life in which such emotion would merely disappear.

"I suppose so. My master is a man who could live without it."

"Blue dragon?"

"Yes, _Lan se long_. He taught me that power was more precious than anything; it is what had preserved his life."

"At the expense of everything?"

"Yes." Astonishingly, Xi Go musters a brief, rather humorless laugh at that notion. "Yes, at the expense of being alive. I hate him still for his cruelties, for his inhumanity, even as I know that he was and is one of the greatest practitioners of alchemy among the heavens and earth."

"But..."

"But, I could not. Even throughout those endless years, starved of anything but the blazing agony that burned in my breast, I knew that I could not be deprived of those precious feelings. I deluded myself into the belief that it was a craving for retribution that prevented me from discarding them, but I longed for love." Effortlessly, my lover reverses me; the slender splendor of her fingertips easing gently beneath my chin, and I find my gaze lifted gracefully to her own. Beauteous, fathomless oceans of raven perfection devour me; I smile, at long last. "And I have found it. And... Regardless of what you may have felt between Reinhardt and Jacqueline, they have found it, as well."

"Will they be fine?" Perhaps it's silly, but I remain fixated upon them. I understand that they are not Xi Go and I; that we do not live our lives in complete parallel. Nevertheless, however, their victories endow me with hope; their losses and tragedies gall at those precious threads.

"I do not know, Kimberly; I cannot predict the future."

"No?" It's a disappointment.

"You cannot predict the future. Even the most powerful practitioner of the _Tao_ cannot fathom its fullest secrets. Can even the greatest priest or monk beg of god knowledge of what will be?"

"I... I do not believe in that any longer, _Shego_." Perhaps I never had. I have been inundated since birth with the certain knowledge of god's sanctity, of His ineffable but complete perfection; that this distant and cruel father should be worshiped with a fealty beyond the devotion of a wife to a husband, and a husband to a wife; that nothing is too precious to be sacrificed for its glory. I have feared it, but I realize now that I have never felt that sense of truth, of love and completion, that I do amidst this curious and uncertain magic; this nebulous and unpretentiously absolute force that holds all answers and reveals none, and communicates nothing to even the most ferociously striving mystics.

"No, Kimberly? Are you certain?" There is no judgment in her eyes; perhaps god is an alien novelty to her, but I know that she would never begrudge me that.

"I think now that perhaps I never did. Not that... Not that god, in any event; not the sense of it my parents hold. I do not think there much difference at the root of it, except for language and prophets; whether it is... It is Abraham or Laozi, Christ or Zhuangzi," a secret, giddy welter of joy springs into my breast as my lips embrace those names that now seem so familiar, "I do not think that there is much difference."

"Then, you are right. Everyone is; there is no true name for the _Tao_. There have been those that have despised even that word, for it is only a word; ideas are meaningless before such complete and pure power." I adore Xi Go's praise; I delight at the tender, caressing warmth of her palms upon my cheeks.

"_Shego_?"

"Yes, Kimberly?"

"What is the gift that you'd promised me?" I cannot bear any trace of melancholy any longer. Perhaps it is childish and irresponsible, but an earnest contemplation of the _Tao_ is simply insignificant by contrast with whatever sublime delight my beloved has conjured for me in reward for my most diligent efforts.

"A gift?" My face falls for a moment at the palpable obliviousness that rises into her features, as if some abomination has stripped her of any memory of that looming joy.

"Well, I..."

"I'm sorry, Kimberly." A kiss silences my yammering anxiety, and a sense of sublime silliness overtakes me. I realize that I've been consumed by a furious pining for that, for the soothing splendor of her lips upon my own; for that glorious warmth that stills even the most nightmarish of terrors, and ignites a flame that blazes through even the deepest darkness. "You're... You're so very sweet. How could I resist teasing my Love?" I can only pout; an earnest, effusive, and exaggeratedly childish sulk, offering her a pitiful, liquid stare through enormous lashes. "Oh, Kimberly..."

"I was afraid that you really had forgotten." Partially, in any event. My mind continues to reel from the bewildering events of the day; and, even as I immerse myself in this joy with a ferocious intensity, the abject, shivering horror of Maria's tangible madness and unfathomable, supernatural cruelty lingers. A sense of total, draining bewilderment endures with equal intensity; the overpowering, enervating effects of this peculiar power are so extraordinary that I cannot yet control them with any facility.

"Kimberly... I have lived for nearly three-hundred years, and can remember each instant; would you expect me to forget something that I promised you only today?" Her beauty is transcendental; it is genuinely ageless. Perhaps she seems merely several years my senior, but there is a truly palpable endurance in her spirit that raises her splendor to the venerable majesty of a true goddess.

"No." Despite myself, I feel a certain abashment, as if I am again a naughty child. "No, you wouldn't. I've... I've just such a peculiar sense of exhaustion, _Shego_."

"Because of what you have experienced?" She understands immediately; clasping me in her embrace, periodically salving the raw, lingering vestiges of fear and sorrow with the incomparable warmth of her kiss, I suppose that she naturally would.

"Yes. Everything... Today, everything has been so peculiar. I- I have felt that power with much greater intensity and urgency; it is frightening."

"And it will be, My Kimberly; I will not lie to you. Everything will, from this point forth, become unbelievably difficult; it will be surreal and truly supernatural."

"I am prepared for that, _Shego_." It is not a lie, however patently ridiculous it may seem. While I may be unable to even begin to envisage what awaits me, my conviction to embrace every challenge, to delight in every ordeal, is genuine.

"I know that you are, My Kimberly. And that is why I wish to reward you for this terrible, terrible challenge." Spoken with a twinge of wry humor. Our glorious embrace, and this soaring, luminous love that engulfs us has been reward enough, but I certainly cannot begrudge my beloved her generosity.

"It has been excruciating, _Shego_..." I join her with the utmost playfulness, offering her piteous and whimpering strains of torment and lament. "To kiss you, to touch you, for you to... To pleasure me endlessly." Majestically, her pale cheeks gleam with a subdued flush at those words.

"Then tonight, I suspect, will be a suffering beyond imagination, my Love." She drawls.

"What are we to do, _Shego_? Please." My imagination drifts to the glorious, fragrant splendor of the garden, of our secret, smoldering embrace amidst its transcendental natural majesty; the urgent, powerful, almost feral embrace of bodies, of lips and hands roaming along flushed and glistening skin...

"There is something awaiting us in our chambers."

"Please, tell me!" How can I not be consumed with this impatience?

"You are so very sweet, My Kimberly." Another kiss, fierce and lingering, accentuates that with a glorious intensity; darkness consumes my sight as weighty lids flutter closed, every trace of breath robbed by the furious and blistering pressure of her pliant and commanding lips. I barely realize that I'm already being tugged, dazed and delirious, from the European chambers with merely a desultory clatter of the door as my eyes open again.

"T-that simply isn't fair." My complaints are as persuasive as a starving man's rejection of a feast.

"I know." I trail behind her with an almost unaccountable, deft adroitness atop heels that once hobbled me; every step is of effortless grace, my vision wreathed with a sudden and glorious fringe of vermillion lust. My gaze devours the sashay of her full hips; an inner sight supplies in image of the creamy delight that lies beneath the shimmering darkness of her gown. I no longer even flush with anything but a boiling and irrepressible wantonness at such thoughts; perhaps I truly am possessed by some lascivious demon.

"The storm is growing stronger." And it is; even as the rain has lifted for the moment, a violent, shimmering energy has alighted through the gathering darkness. Barely the minutest trickle of the sun's struggling luster slithers through the stout and turbid ocean of thunderclouds that boil and churn overhead; vast plains of sullen gray, streaked with an ominous penumbra that conjures an image of the deepest abyss. The distant, throbbing roar of thunder resounds as if the howl of some monstrous and impossible beast; blazing flickers of lightning sear through the humid stillness that is pregnant with the promise of some great cataclysm.

"Will it lift?"

"I would hope." I suppose that not even Xi Go can control such a storm; or, perhaps, she will not. We are unmolested by anyone as we retreat to our chambers; swift footsteps see us through the rippling, unearthly crimson of the hall, and again into the courtyard, ancient stone damp with the passage of the rains. "I would very much hope so."

"Couldn't you-"

"Could I halt the storm, Kimberly?" I can visualize the wry quirking of her lips at that.

"Well..." It hardly seems impossible, now.

"I could." Xi Go's answer is that of matter-of-fact certainty, as if merely addressing a supremely obvious truth.

"Y-you're serious?" I finally tug her to a halt as we traipse into the solemn emptiness of the children's wing; it does not yet resound with the wondrous, gasping strains of our embrace, and I am astonished by the sheer lifelessness that consumes it.

"Of course." She finally turns, even as she draws me nearer and nearer to our bedchambers. I cannot restrain a ridiculous and positively enormous smile at the affirmation that it is our shared room; the center of our intimacy, of that beauteous and incomparable union. The gloriously engraved door parts with a mild whisper of hinges, clattering behind us as I vault into her embrace again, at long last. Even with Reinhardt's acceptance of our love, of Jacqueline's similar toleration, we could not be emboldened to consume one another with the riotous, seismic force that now convulses me; the overpowering, blazing desire that is not suited for anyone's eyes but our own.

"Tell me how." That command eases between our lips in a staccato rhythm, each word preceded by the fierce, smoldering capture of my beloved's mouth.

"K-Kimberly." Even Xi Go seems astounded by the intensity with which I claim her, hands fastening upon my lover's, applying my modest weight to her wondrously full and glorious body in a distinctly futile struggle to pin her against the unyielding portal.

"Tell me, _Shego_." A gentle, needling nip of teeth upon her fine and willowy throat coaxes merely a glorious torrent of quiet whimpers from my goddess, her slim fingers, consumed with a mild and sensual tremor, beginning to crumple the fine fabric of my gown.

"I..." Magnificently, a low, tortured groan is the reply as I, with an excruciating effort, ease away from her. "Kimberly!"

"Not until you tell me, and show me what my gift is." A claim which I will be hopeless to maintain beyond a few minutes; my sight is already misting with a delirious and overpowering lust; my knees are water; a blazing and urgent heat pools within my abdomen, flowing lower and lower with every passing moment.

"Y-you're serious?" My lover is as incredulous as I am, but she nevertheless humors me with an unsteady smile of shivering lust that sends those molten tendrils of yammering need lancing through me with ever greater intensity. "All right..." A true seductress, Xi Go, with vulpine grace and eroticism, reclines against the door; her full and gloriously sculpted legs ease further along the floor, heels delicately grazing along fine and robust wood; ever more tantalizing tracts of pale ivory sheathed with midnight silk greet my gluttonous gaze, hungrily devouring every suggestion of that singular splendor. One hand settles with deliberate, teasing elegance upon the voluptuous abundance of her breast; the other lazily eases through her voluminous raven mane, slender fingers the tines of a pallid and beauteous comb.

"I can simply invoke the powers of river dragons and storm gods to halt this tempest; I can petition them, or bind them with my power." A sidelong gaze of deep and alluring sloe, fine tendrils of deepest black whispering along her pale cheeks, stokes that flame to a soaring inferno; the play of a wondrous pink perfection across her rouged lips virtually sends me tumbling to my knees in prayerful worship.

"O-oh..." And I feel as if I will spring upon her without restraint; I could ravish her as though a savage, rending the gown from her body and devouring her beauty with a bandit's greed. "I..."

"Not now, Kimberly." I am paralyzed; with this mad, irrational, and inarticulate lust, and with some irresistible power that feels a momentous pair of hands crushing upon my shoulders, separating me from the simmering majesty of my beloved's divine perfection.

"W-what?"

"Hadn't you said that you wanted to know, my Love?" And she delights in this torture, even as the most glorious and undeniably aroused flush blazes upon her creamy cheeks. "For me to show you what your gift is?"

"I- I don't care!" I no longer do; how could I possibly?

"Well, I do." The hands guide me toward the mattress, even as my gaze, shimmering with a furious, wanton craving, remains fixed upon my beloved. "It will be glorious. We're going out this evening, Kimberly; I'm taking you to see Shanghai."


	12. Bund

"S-Shanghai?" From my forced perch upon the stout tangle of fine silk atop our bed, I offer my beloved an expression of the utmost incredulity.

"Yes, Kimberly." Xi Go, reclining with that wondrously languorous, vulpine seductiveness against the intricate patterns engraved upon our door, grants me supremely sensual quirking of full and glorious lips that would reduce me to a molten heap of pining madness if it were not for the invisible hands that anchor me to this supremely demure posture. My hands lie as an enervated and numb thicket of fingers atop the fine fabric of my skirt; my ankles intertwined as if an anxious child, even as my eyes behold with a swelling need the transcendental beauty that remains so cruelly beyond my reach.

"I... This is Shanghai; what remains to be seen?" Even as those exasperated and tortured words emerge from my mouth, a savage and mortified flush wells through the vermillion lust that consumes my blazing skin. "T-that is..."

"You're so sweet, my Love." I am, at once, liberated; I do not spring to my feet, however, fearing that I'll merely discover myself again, chastened and paralyzed, upon this wondrous heap of fragrant bedding.

"Well, I..." A deep and trembling, heated breath filters from my tautly straining lips; an almost unaccountable and insufferable aggravation has settled across my fevered mind, impelling me to rage at the utter barbarity of depriving me of anything so glorious as her touch, as that sublime and unparalleled intimacy, for the sake of a mere city. I had visualized an exotic and singular pleasure beyond even the boundaries of my increasingly imaginative arousal. "I can think of nothing but this as Shanghai, _Shego_; this... This is our life together; even if we must preserve this ridiculous facade for the sake of my parents, I adore the garden. It- it feels so very magical."

"Do you fear that our love will be any less amid the city's rich delights, Kimberly?" I had not; it's a perfectly ludicrous notion, though any laughter at that is stillborn at the earnest and solemn warmth manifest in those wondrous sloe pools.

"Well... No, of course not; that's nonsense." A brief, quirking and uneasy grin settles upon my lips. "Not at all. I... I simply cannot imagine that anything lies beyond this; I barely think of the city that does not reach beyond our walls, through the magic of that garden. It all seems so alien; I wonder why it is even needed."

"I thought that it would interest you, My Kimberly." If anything, Xi Go seems a bit disappointed; perhaps with my rather callow and insensitive disinterest in her gift, perhaps with my utterly hopeless and small-minded insularity. I've the certainty of achieving a rather spectacular burgundy with the sudden resurrection of that awful and pitiful childishness; that anything so silly will merely further accentuate how pathetically immature I am, even as I struggle to achieve a true worthiness for that wondrous soul that throbs within me.

"I was also a bit frustrated." She seems, if anything, relieved with that quiet, murmuring admission.

"About what, Kimberly?" As if there could exist any question of what convulses me with this fervent and furious, yammering need; this unrelenting and irrepressible craving for the blissful and incomparable majesty of her hands upon my skin; this urgent and furious pleading for the tenderest and most intimate of caresses of a singular glory upon that most secret of delights.

"You're... You can be so cruel." Whispered without even the minutest kernel of malice, even as I'm certain that I'll truly be set aflame by this roiling, desperate, and utterly infernal need that roars within my breast; that sends molten currents of liquid lust sluicing across every inch of my skin; pooling with the most exquisite, pining torture through that molten core of truly tangible yearning.

"My Kimberly..." With the most achingly, sensually sadistic of whispers, those beauteous words rippling through my senses as if an apparition of the purest eroticism, Xi Go eases beside me; her warmth enfolds me as though the embrace of the divine, stoking already mad and manic flames to a height that reduces me to wilting, incoherent rapture.

"_Shego_..." I reel at the enormity of the soaring pyre that blazes away every semblance of thought and sense; a spirit of the utmost, shivering lust devours me, claims every reach of my mind. I can ponder nothing but the singular and transcendental majesty of that surging ecstasy in her embrace. "I..."

"I know, My Kimberly." The faintest, ghosting brush of wondrous lips upon my cheek yields a new and exultant, screaming escalation of that need. She's bewitched me; her sorcery has devoured me utterly, and I could never desire anything but that complete and all-consuming craving for her. "I know."

"So, shall-"

"Kimberly." Merely the most playful suggestion of exasperation as her lovely and delicate fingers, fine and glorious bearers of a rapture unequaled, interlace with my own. "I've driven you mad, haven't I?"

"Yes." That answer emerges with unhesitating candor; it's not merely madness. It's a yowling, lunatic desperation, a hysteria that even that sublime indulgence can merely place in abeyance. It is as if a man bedeviled by opium; a living presence that permeates every reach of the soul, a liquid, craving heat flaring through everything with its yammering demand for satisfaction. "Yes, you have."

"I'm certain that you'll adore Shanghai, my Darling." Xi Go curls against me with a serpentine grace, gloriously elegant, voluptuous splendor seeming to envelop me in a mist of delirious delight; I cannot refuse her anything.

"I- I'm certain that I will with you." Beneath that shrill and irresistible command, that furious insistence that I ravish her, that I abandon everything to coax such wondrous and beauteous, keening wails from her lips, to convulse her with an insufferable, electric ecstasy, there lies an almost unaccountable fear. No longer am I consumed with terror at the thought that this is but a dream; the surreal, whirling oddity of this supernatural embrace, of this inexorable discovery of what lies at the core of this transcendental soul, has affirmed for me that such horrors are merely the figments of a fevered and tortured imagination, wracked with insecurity in a void of certain love.

Rather, I am afraid for the simple, prosaic truth that, however deftly I may be regaining my command of the nebulous and exotic powers of the _Tao_; however fiercely, passionately confident I feel in Xi Go's embrace; however I rage with a warrior's true spirit amid the fragrant and serene magnificence of the garden, I am very much an unworldly child. Even the congenial disorder of Shanghai's harbor devoured me with a mad and quivering terror, a sense of hidden and unfathomable dangers lying within even the kindest of market stalls; of human predators more terrible than asps lurking in wait with inscrutable and awful motives. As we traveled through Shanghai, as I confronted that awful and unfathomable juxtaposition of the most bewildering, grinding poverty and ostentatious wealth, my only thought was of the utterly dreadful evil that must lurk at the core of the city, as with any other; of the decadent and fearful spirit that seeks nothing but to pervert and torture the souls of its benighted residents.

The incomparable tranquility of the garden, of this secret and mystic enclave amongst such roaring, vulgar and churning oceans of humanity, has preserved me amid an ocean of otherwise unyielding terror; I have not devoted even the slightest thought to what truly lies beyond these walls, beyond the sheltering embrace of that writhing dragon's scales.

"Are you afraid, Kimberly?"

"Yes." With this glorious contact, one arm now laced with the utmost tenderness around the arc of my waist, the other joining her hand with my own, I have no doubt that my seething and overpowering fear ripples through that wondrous and ethereal thread of jade as if a scream. "I am. I- I feel perfectly silly."

"You should not. But, you have no cause to fear for anything, Kimberly; never." My lover affirms this with an effortless courage that quiets those shuddering, scalding embers of fear with a sublime, luxuriant chill.

"I know." I could never fear anything in Xi Go's arms, in her most wondrous presence; an aura of power, of singular and irrepressible strength, consumes her, sheathing me in its majesty. "I know, _Shego_. It... It is just all so alien. I- I've never truly been away from a sheltered life; even seeing Shanghai was a revelation."

"Did you never explore Saint Petersburg?" Xi Go seems perhaps a bit bemused at such a notion; it is, I suppose, the acme of unworldliness to have failed even to experience the abundant, sprawling magnificence of what I considered to be the most glorious city upon the planet; a repository of mankind's most sublime and incomparable culture, a beacon of civilization gleaming with a diamond luster amid the tarnished decay and decrepitude of the race.

"Not... Not truly. Mother and father would take me to the palaces, and we would sometimes visit the shops and galleries on Nevskiy Prospekt." I can feel a peculiar and giddy delight shivering through that bond, and I turn to her; she greets me with a smile of swollen glee. "W-what is it?"

"I haven't heard anything in Russian from you for ages. I almost feared that you'd forgotten your promise to teach me." I suppose that I have; my thoughts have been of nothing but Xi Go, of Bao Li, of our enduring and eternal love that resonates throughout the distant and mystic history of China. Russia seems but a foreign apparition; a peculiar and alien echo of a past now cloaked in a pall of torturous darkness. Perhaps it is merely a reminder of years squandered in her absence, of a life of indulgent and pathetic childhood, bereft of this wisdom and transcendence; perhaps it is a twinging fear of some lingering sense of infidelity, of it being untrue to Xi Go, for it is not wholly of her.

"I... I suppose that I haven't thought of it." Xi Go, however, patiently and diligently, has introduced me to Chinese; to her Chinese, she explained, one glorious and melodious, sonorous splendor amongst a vast constellation of tongues. It now seems intuitive to me; the fluid and pure pitches of _Wu _that seem to resonate with my very spirit return to me as if the most glorious of balmy spring breezes in the aftermath of a tortured and savage winter. Speaking that, my lips again caressing those words that flow with a languorous and elegant grace, I feel as if I am again complete; that the soul of Bao Li, of Xi Go's enduring and undying love, rises again as though not a single day has parted us.

"I hope that you will." She speaks those words with a fervent and pining intensity, her wondrous and beauteous, breathy voice suffused with a captivating and rich, velvet warmth.

"Truly?" I am truly incredulous. By contrast with the glorious and almost extravagant magnificence of her language... Our language, truly... I'm astounded that she would ever wish to hear even a word of anything that seems so hopelessly banal.

"You promised me, didn't you, Kimberly?"

"I... I suppose that I haven't devoted any thought to it; I've barely even thought anything in Russian unless I've spoken with Vasilevich." A brief, sullen sigh. "And, I do not know if I desire it. It feels as if it's but a reflection of some hollow and terrible, false past; a time before I even knew you, _Shego_. When- I was not this Kimberly, when-"

"You were, and are, this Kimberly, my Love." Xi Go interrupts me with a sudden and stern intensity; her eyes flare with a seething welter of emotion, powerful and almost overbearing. "How often have I told you this?" She has; again and again, despite my doubts, she has accentuated that that past existence has not been but a lie, a feeble and purposeless squandering of my existence in some terrible perdition, denied her love.

"I... I know."

"So, please, teach me Russian, Kimberly; I have never learned it."

"Not a word?" I'm rather astonished that one so inquisitive and scholarly as Xi Go never would have explored it.

"Perhaps a few when I visited Vladivostok with my master." A wry quirking of her lovely lips in a grin that suggests they are not words that one would repeat in polite company. "I do not believe that it would be much appreciated for me to repeat them."

"When was that?"

"When we visited Vladivostok? That... That was perhaps a half-century ago, or so; it was not quite so large as I understand it now is." Unaccountably, that seems merely to be days; I've become so accustomed to my lover's casual references to a life spanning hundreds of years, never mind the realization of my own soul's endurance, that fifty seems but a gasp.

"I've never seen it."

"It... It is very cold." A brief flicker of a vaguely bashful grin. "Very inhospitable." It seems as if Xi Go fears that any criticism of what once was my nation will upset me.

"Will I truly love Shanghai, _Shego_?"

"Why else would I reward you with an evening in the city, my Love?" She offers me a thoroughly luminous smile, bewitching and irresistible in its immensity; any reservations seem to dissolve at the subtlest caress of that glorious, radiant splendor upon my sight. "I am certain that you'll love it; you've never, ever seen anything like it before." I've little doubt of that.

"Where... Where will we be going, anyway?" My knowledge of the city itself extends merely to the brief, sullen darkness that welled before our motorcar throughout that trek from the pier that now seems little more than a distant wisp of a dream.

"The Bund, of course." A vibrant glimmering of joy ripples through her dark and sensual gaze.

"The federation?" A furious, swollen flush unfolds across my cheeks at a giggle that a truly noble struggle fails to stifle. "W-what is it?"

"It's the waterfront, Kimberly; it just refers to the European concession. It's the most fashionable part of Shanghai." Xi Go, quite extraordinarily, becomes an elder sister to me, even as this blazing adoration and lust continue to coruscate in tangible currents through our bond; chiding me for my boundless naïvete and unworldliness.

"O-oh." A beat. "Is it at all like Nevskiy Prospekt?"

"I suppose so." A faint, careless shrug. "I- I've never seen it. I wish that I could have with you."

"I fear then that we never would have seen a single shop." And I, again, with an almost manic elation, kiss her; I kiss her and kiss her until we're positively breathless as we part, even as I feel as if my lungs could never again strain for a single breath.

"I fear that we would have been quite a scandal, Kimberly. Wouldn't you have feared for your reputation?" I adore that mild, teasing whisper, fluttering against my ear with a breathy warmth; I love that she knows now, without question and without ambiguity, that my desire for her transcends anything so trivial.

"No." I sincerely cannot envision now being so alarmed about such trifles. "I'll be ecstatic to proclaim to everyone that we meet that we're in love; that I adore my _Shego_ with a love that fills an undying soul. I wish that there were a convenient mountain from which to scream it."

"Will I need to worry about us this evening, my Love?" A wry murmur against my throat that raises a curious and heady swelling of lust and giggling jubilation.

"Will you? Aren't I your wife, now, _Shego_?" It occurs to me that I have never once spoken that word so naturally, so blithely, as it truly should be; however gloriously reverential, it should be said without fear, without trepidation, without anything but the utmost, soaring and singular ecstasy at such perfection.

"I am, My Kimberly." She affirms this with the utmost intensity; a blazing, furious and overwhelming welling of passion that eclipses anything that I have ever experienced. "I am." Xi Go repeats. "I am."

"I... I can't believe that- that we are. I know that we can perhaps merely be... _Dui Shi_," I speak those curious words with a sudden and achingly acute familiarity, "But what do words matter?"

"Nothing." She gleams with a radiant and ebullient joy that floods me as if from a shattered dam. "Nothing at all, Kimberly."

"You didn't receive a dowry, though, did you?" Giddily, rapturously, I feel comfortable in teasing her; I truly can. This is not merely a dream; not merely some extraordinary and ephemeral fantasy born of a fevered mind that will evaporate as surely as morning mist beneath the sun's glower.

"Shall I ask your parents?" Even that cannot upset me; my smile, ever-widening, does not falter in the slightest.

"If only." A slightly soberer thought occurs to me. "_Shego_... Did- did my parents ever accept that we were in love? Aside from my mother; you mentioned that once she had." There is no answer; for the briefest and cruelest of instants, that severe and impassive patina settles upon her eyes, and I realize that that is my answer. "I suppose that doesn't matter, does it?"

"We cannot do our Confucian duty, but I'm sure that will not bother you too terribly. Will it, my Love?"

"Having children? It... It sounds a bit frightening, sincerely." Even with that, with something so fundamental, I am a complete innocent; the merest glimpse of Jacqueline, debilitated with such strain and torment, even with the ordeal of Reinhardt's parents' relentless awfulness, assuredly scoured away whatever sentimental notions toward that curious phenomenon that I had entertained. "I... Have we ever?"

"I do not think that's possible, Kimberly." Again, merely the faintest glimmer of amusement that coaxes a furious flush seemingly from the very depths of my soul.

"O-oh, yes." A beat. "I suppose that's true. So... A man really is necessary for that?" Those words emerge in the most hopelessly pathetic manner possible, little more than the feeblest ghost of a whisper that trickles with the utmost reserve from between my lips. I know, upon some fundamental level, that it is ludicrous to even ask; I'm simply not entirely certain of why.

"Yes." My relief is indescribable that she delivers that reply with the utmost, neutral gentleness. "Yes. Did... Did your mother never discuss these matters with you?"

"No. Oh, god, no." A mortified sheen of scarlet lunges above even my unendurable embarrassment at so fiercely brandishing my unworldliness about such matters. "I... I could never even begin to conceive of discussing that with her; anything that... That she would deem so sinful."

"Did she not wish for you to have a husband?" If only that were the case; perhaps she would be more appreciative of Xi Go.

"Well... I am sure that she would have upon my wedding night, or before that. I- I know that..." My mind desperately gropes for words that are not even within my universe of understanding. "I am certain that my parents do... Romantic things."

"Bedroom business?" Somehow, that euphemism is at once almost gruesomely lurid and wondrously oblique.

"I- I suppose so, yes." It seems a truly pernicious transgression to discuss my parents; particularly as they have become ever sterner and more distant, it seems inconceivable that they would even be capable of the unrestrained, raging sensuality and passion that devours us as we make love. "Is- is it like we do?"

"That..." Her features darken; merely for the briefest of instants, but that solemn and tortured, weighty grief seems to unfold for an endless, aching eternity. "That is not something that I would like to discuss."

"O-oh." A fervent craving to simply erase that instant from reality overtakes me; I strive to devour that palpable sorrow with the brush of my lips upon hers, playfully, yieldingly tender. The smile that greets me is a wondrous relief; a radiant flame that blazes through the icy anxiety that has gripped my heart.

"Never mind, Kimberly. I have much yet to teach you, I gather."

"Yes." I would rather be devoured by eternal mortification than glimpse such manifest anguish upon her beauteous features. "Yes, I think that you have."

"Tonight, however, I would much rather introduce you to a city that has changed more than I could ever have imagined." A wondrous exuberance consumes her, and our attention is again, magnificently, wrenched away from any contemplation of such awful, distant sorrow.

"Is it beautiful?" From afar, it seemed rather a paragon of ordinariness; a transplantation of the essence of orderly European structure and pretension to a land now subordinated to its stultifying rapacity.

"Shanghai? It..." For a moment, astonishingly, Xi Go again appears as if words have failed her; that the convoluted immensity of Shanghai is perhaps beyond anything so prosaic as mere description. "It is Shanghai; like any city, there can be found extraordinary splendor and unspeakable ugliness." It seems, however, as if Shanghai eclipses anything so common as a mere city.

"But-"

"Why am I so eager for you to see it?" Xi Go is again positively luminous with a genuinely palpable delight. "Because I yearn to see it with you; to experience this Shanghai with you. We... We have often visited the city; we have lived amidst its glorious bustle and anarchy; we have even taken our vows at a temple devoted to the _Tao_. It has never been anything but exhilarating; that was why I decided to reserve this evening for it." I feel my heart swell with a positively singular elation at that; the notion of this being another glorious revistation of the moments of our past lives, even as we resurrect each memory with sublime reinvention.

"I don't understand." I don't believe that I've ever spoken those words with such heady glee.

"The progress that you have attained is extraordinary, Kimberly. You- you can now control yourself and your power so well. You are now an adept." That word is again a distant echo of some supremely familiar delight.

"W-what?"

"An adept, Kimberly. You have now begun to command the powers of the _Tao_, of alchemy, with the strength of a budding immortal." Without restraint, without thought, my arms find themselves flung around the lithe and graceful sweep of her waist; I bury myself against the fragrant abundance of her breast, overcome with a sense of almost maniacal delight. Tears threaten to stream forth as if a flooding river from eyes suddenly consumed with a quavering mist at the sudden sense of transcendence that overtakes me. It's as if, at once, every shred of desperate, yammering anxiety that has gnawed with unremitting, cruel tenacity at me has lifted with those mere words; that the perennial, all-consuming fear of failing her, of never achieving that liberation from the links of humanity that continue to imprison this soul within an unrelenting chain of grief, has dissolved.

"Truly? Truly?" I feel as if I could repeat that for all eternity, basking in this supreme triumph, even as I command her confirmation again and again.

"Truly, Kimberly." A fierce and emphatic whisper that seems virtually a shout that resounds with thundering splendor through my senses. "Truly."

"I'm..." That nothing so banal as mere words could aspire to capture this exultation is hardly a shattering epiphany. No longer must I convey my delight with them; liquid glee floods and cascades through this wondrous jade bond, swelling through our hearts and enveloping us in a molten haze of utter rapture. "I'm so happy." I nevertheless do speak, however; a quiet and tearful murmur that trickles with heated intensity from the very core of my soul. "I'm so happy."

"Soon, My Kimberly, there will be no need for tears; for anything but an eternity of joy in one another's arms. Soon, there will be no need to fear the passage of time." Those words seem wreathed with a seething and passionate ecstasy, vibrating with a supernatural intensity that further lifts my soul to heights unimagined.

"You..."

"Yes, Kimberly." A harsh and anxious swallow. "I could feel your fear as surely as my own; but I did not fear for any lacking on your part. I... I was terrified that I would fail to teach you; that my instruction would not suffice to raise you to that mastery. But, my worries were ridiculous. You- you have achieved a progress that I could never have believed."

"I'm prepared for my reward, _Shego_." And I truly am. A sense of incomparable, swollen power suffuses me, and I've the certainty that I could challenge the city itself with complete impunity.

"Are you?" If anything, Xi Go seems even more delighted than I with this revelation; her beauteous and dulcet voice resounds with a glorious pitch of pure elation, and the image of her tearing me to my feet in a crushing embrace seems merely an inevitability.

"Well..." Amid this manic and almost hysterical blur of thoughts and churning, exultant emotions, I can but kiss her again; crushing my lips to her own, devouring her with an ecstasy indescribable. Xi Go has borne me to these heights; Xi Go has nurtured this strength; my lover, my beloved, has guided me throughout every day with aching and incomparable tenderness, ushering me toward transcendence with the enormity of our bond.

"Kimberly!" Incredibly, her complexion reddens as fiercely as my own with the intensity of our embrace; fingers interlace, and I realize that I've now the strength to tug her to her feet as I rise. It's as if I've experienced some singular rebirth; rejoining her again from behind a once impenetrable shroud, I embrace her anew, claiming her soul with the pure and blazing force of love that throbs through my own.

"I love you. I love you!" I proclaim; I truly shout those words that ring of absolution; of salvation from this unspeakable sin of ignorance, of distance, from Xi Go. Nothing now separates us; nothing possibly could. My fear, unreasoning and horrific in its urgent torment, streams away. "I love you, _Shego_."

"And I love you." Her smile broadens to impossibly vast proportions; an expansive ocean of ivory forming amid banks of vermillion that I yearn to rend away wholly with the sheer force of the kisses with which I shower her. "I love you, Kimberly." A blissful eternity unfolds in a few instants that pass in silence, before a sudden revelation seems to strike her. "Close your eyes."

"A-again?" I suppose that I've become fairly accustomed to every, ever more blissful, surprise being announced by that curious incantation. "For what?"

"It's a surprise." And I comply without hesitation; lids flutter closed, even as an inner sight struggles to part upon a world that nevertheless remains cloaked in an impenetrable blackness. "And you're not allowed to avail yourself of your newfound gifts, my beautiful adept."

"I... All right." As powerful as I have become within such a strikingly brief span of time, I've little doubt that it's merely the minutest shard of the glimmering enormity of her own strength. "I promise."

"Don't open them until I tell you, Kimberly." Startlingly, my lover's sensual tones filter from behind me; a sultry and tantalizing caress that ignites a prickling shiver across my flesh.

"I... I won't; I promise." I could never shatter my vow to her, regardless of how seemingly trivial. That iron, unyielding certainty of our unfailing devotion, of our unflagging conviction, is of an intensity of meaning and purpose that eclipses anything that I could ever have envisioned. "I promise."

"Good." And a pitiful and fragile squeal lunges from my throat at the sudden stroke of ice across my skin as elegant and graceful fingers unlace my gown with effortless alacrity; invisible digits peel away that fine and silken fabric from flesh alight with a blistering excitement. It's as if I'm surrounded by her touch; lingering, blazing caresses that virtually reduce my knees to water as I keen and sigh with an absolutely overpowering ecstasy. I realize that I'm actually being lifted from the robust and ancient wood; a peculiar and uncanny weightlessness that conjures a surreal and transcendental sense of flight. I know, however, that I have not even strayed in the slightest from our chambers, enveloped by the perfumed majesty of our mingled scents and the sublime fragrances trickling upon a damp night wind from the garden silent with the straining anxiety of a looming storm.

"_S-Shego_-"

"Shh..." A whisper beside my ear silences me, fluttering across flesh now hypersensitive with a raw and sensuous disorientation that renders even the subtlest grace of a distant breeze a thundering blow. "Don't speak, my Love; only feel." And I do, with an intensity that soars with every passing instant amid this extraordinary flight. At once, I'm certain that I'm bared utterly to the wild and untamed embrace of the wind and those countless, ethereal hands, every one imbued with the sensual and incomparable warmth of my beloved.

She touches me; innumerable searching and questing hands riot along my inflamed skin, as if countless spectral incarnations of my beloved worship me with impossible and glorious caresses. I cannot remain silent; low, mewling whimpers work themselves inexorably from my pursed lips, swelling to keening cries of a truly transcendental rapture as those supernatural fingers mischievously intensify their glorious, stroking ministrations.

"_Shego_!" It's as if my very mind is imploding at the first, grazing brush against the palpitating core of my need; seething tendrils of electric ecstasy writhe and arc across nerves suddenly blazing with an absolutely unendurable sensitivity. And, yet, it halts within mere moments; with my desire stoked to a searing, vermillion peak, she withdraws that bewilderingly wondrous touch with such excruciating cruelty. "_Shego_!"

"Be patient, Kimberly." A dictate spoken with the utmost, rapturous sadism, sultry tones whispering of the heaving splendor of her voluptuous grandeur and bewitching lips.

"T-that's not fair!" I protest with another girlish wail, realizing that she's no intention of continuing; that those fingers, gliding into the very deepest, secretest center of my mad, irrepressible craving, would halt is an act of barbarism beyond forgiveness, even as I melt with a shivering and achingly tender passion with the kiss of that full and captivating darkness against my nape.

"I know." Astonishingly, I feel myself being shrouded against that surreal haze of electric dampness that hangs in palpable sheets around us; the whispering serenade of transcendentally fine silk, clinging to my body as though to meld with my very skin. It seems as if it fastens inseparably upon me; a delicate and glorious pressure that swells and withdraws with the fluid ease of the tides with every intake of breath. Even my feet are embraced in that unique and wondrous perfection; fine clasps bind a curious and gently heeled set of shoes to them, a quiet clatter resounding as I'm again lowered by those unfalteringly tender hands upon the floor.

"Open your eyes, My Kimberly." I do; at once, I blink, again and again, as if to force away what seems virtually an impossibly phantasmagorical splendor. A shimmering patina of wondrous and lustrous vermillion ripples along my skin as if a dragon's scales; the delicate swell of my chest accentuated with an almost luridly indecent enormity by the tension that strains and relaxes with organic ease with every intake of the lovely and fragrant air. Striated with darkly luminous seams of gilded beauty, it flows around me as though the embrace of divine mist.

"_S-Shego_!" I gape, that wondrous refrain emerging as a hallowed and rapturous prayer. Even the vast mane of crimson that falls in unruly abundance has been fastened into a taut and flawless braid, rustling along my slender shoulders with each admiring pivot before the mirror's silvered luster. "It's- it's absolutely incredible."

"I'm so glad that you love it." While my ecstatic relish could not conceivably aspire to even begin to approach the pinnacles of unparalleled delight that Xi Go ignites within me, this inarticulate and squealing exultation certainly seems to be some form of love.

"I- I do. I absolutely do. It's so beautiful." My adoring coos are voiced into the graceful and perfumed loveliness of her throat as I hurl myself into Xi Go's embrace, cannoning into her chest with a furious welter of strength and fastening my arms with an intractable intensity about her lithe waist. "I love it; I love it! However did you find anything so extraordinary?"

"It's a secret." A devious and torturously sensual whisper that ignites a flushing petulance within me.

"Please! It's- it's so extraordinary. I'd love to meet the tailor who created this."

"That's not possible, my Beloved." Another uniquely cryptic murmur. She ushers me anew toward the mirror, urging me to behold its crimson splendor. It seems as if the perfection of the _zanze_ that she had bestowed upon me has been heightened further by the true labor of the divine; my bared arms flawless alabaster, clasped in fine evening gloves that envelop them with an imperceptible weightlessness. It's as if assembled with a refinement unattainable by any mortal craftsman; its levity speaks of a fabric beyond the insipid grasp of this plane.

"N-no?"

"No, my Love." She looms above me, a radiant shadow in glorious jade deeper than the luminous stone that glistens upon my chest, swaying with each avid and ecstatic intake of breath.

"Why?"

"This gown is not the work of an earthly tailor, My Kimberly." That confirmation of my rather fanciful suspicions is spoken with a murmur of the utmost drama and intensity; an invocation of the supernatural that positively electrifies me with the notion of being embraced by a garment so exotic and extraordinary.

"Truly?"

"Yes, my Love." A quiet and sensual laugh at my transparent astonishment, as though commissioning a dress from the divine is as common an act as visiting a seamstress.

"How did you obtain it?"

"How? It was a favor, of course; a service owed to me by a dragon of the river, who once shirked his duties to pursue a particularly fetching maiden. In exchange for invoking the forces of the wind and rain in accordance with heaven's itinerary, he assured me that the most singular fabric in heaven and earth would be at my disposal." However freely and promiscuously the divine and grandiose mingle with common humanity, the languid ease with which my lover interacts with such forces instills me with a truly extraordinary awe; perhaps more so at the utter casualness with which she describes such phenomena than the encounters themselves.

I've yet to experience even the subtlest glimpse of a ghost or a spirit; not even anything so comparatively banal in its sheer incredibility as a sprite or a nymph. Then again, perhaps I have; the writhing and shimmering immensity of the garden's life seems to transcend the mere feral flora and fauna of this plane. I can sense a presence beyond that commonness, regardless of how utterly singular its splendor.

"That's... That's incredible, _Shego_."

"I suppose that it is."

"Did the dragon fashion the dress?"

"No; that was another service owed to me. The fabric was actually prepared from heavenly creatures truly indescribable by the dragon's aunt, whose talents are sought out by the Jade Emperor himself. The dress itself is amongst the most beauteous creations of the ghost of Lin Lei Yu, an imperial dressmaker of the Ming Dynasty who was said to have fashioned the most glorious gowns of Emperor Zhengde's illustrious and radiant concubines. He could never begrudge the women with whom he surrounded himself any luxury, and her talents speak to that."

"It's..." A distinctly ridiculous smile settles upon my lips at the knowledge that this sublime garment has been fashioned by a ghost; that a spirit has been channeled in its extraordinary power and perseverance to prepare that most magnificent of dresses for me by my beloved. "It's positively incredible."

"I'm certain that Lin Lei Yu will be delighted, as well, my lovely dragon." A most rapturous shiver consumes me at the deliberate, languorous stroke of her palms, tantalizing and heated, along the fine and sleek definition of my bare arms; her sonorous voice dips to sultry and breathless tones, seeming to rob me of every trace of sense. "You're more beautiful than I could ever possibly have imagined." That whisper ghosts along my throat, slender fingers fastening upon my suddenly scalding skin as a damp and glorious heat settles upon me.

"Dragon?" I find myself melting at that wondrous, blazingly affectionate tribute, my beloved's voice alight with a soaring and palpable delight.

"Of course, my Love. You're of the luminous beauty of the supernatural; you are my dragon, alive with a flaring passion that makes me positively giddy. You've entranced me; you've bewitched me, Kimberly." That low, murmuring worship resonates through my flesh, as if flattering my very nerves with that supreme delight.

"_Shego_, I..." I feel, for the briefest of instants, as if I'm again a hopeless and helpless child; I lack the means of conjuring the most singular power of the supernatural to lavish upon her these delights; I cannot even begin to envisage invoking such extraordinary strength as to aid a wayward dragon, or to commune with the enduring spirit of a royal tailor.

"Do not fear, my Love." She cajoles with the tenderest of whispers, the glorious and fragrant warmth of her cheek clasped against my own. "You will eclipse my power again in time; perhaps sooner than even I could hope. But, before that, shouldn't we lose ourselves amongst the joys of the city?"

"Yes." With a swell of utter rapture, I allow myself to tumble wholly into the all-enveloping splendor of her embrace; little do I expect, as the sleek and powerful warmth of her arms fasten around me, her hands fastening upon my own atop my breast, that we will take flight.

It's not the gradual, lurching ascent of an aeroplane that I can recall from a few visits to the cinema; not the grudging relent of gravity, a rattling and tortured strain against invisible hands finally lofting a cumbersome bird into the darkened skies. It seems virtually an anticlimax; at once, we are airborne, silent and graceful, sheathed with an invisible luster of astoundingly intense and palpable power that lofts us beyond the crushing embrace of the mortal. I am certain, even as I gape with an all-consuming exhilaration, that I should scream with a rending terror; that, as we ease beyond the latticework, drifting with an almost easy and careless elegance through the darkened skies, I should be convulsed with a wailing fear that renders me virtually beyond reason.

I merely smile; a luminous and vast smile of the utmost, serene comfort in her arms; the sleek gray of that ancient stone seems virtually downy through the gauzy haze that shimmers beneath the diffuse gleam of the moon that seeps in ragged trickles through the boiling drifts of blackened clouds; the garden is a startlingly vast riot of wondrously rich and tangled foliage, melding and intertwining into a single, vibrant ocean of deep, murky, and mysterious emerald.

"_Shego_." At long last, I discover my voice; husky and low with an astonishment at the bewildering silence at this height, as if we've now risen beyond the reach of mortal sound.

"Yes, Kimberly?" There is no strain in this ascent, drifting beyond the rippling dragon's scales that encircle our home.

"Are we flying?" It seems almost impossibly fatuous, and yet I can scarcely believe that this is anything but an utterly majestic delusion. Pitifully, I have never desired flight; my mind has never invoked that glorious imagery of soaring beyond barriers that I had barely even felt, so wholly had I submitted to that crushing ordinariness of my existence. Now, as we are lofted upon invisible currents into the crisp, electrifying darkness of this mystic night, I realize that this is what had eluded me; in her arms, enveloped in that supreme grandeur of our love that shivers and dances around us as a living presence, I am ever more perfected.

"Yes, Kimberly; we're flying." My love does not announce this with matter-of-fact banality; this is a supreme splendor, a transcendental supernatural glory that sends a lustrous current of liquid joy, of the most luminous and extraordinary golden brilliance, coursing through us. It dances and arcs in lighting currents between us; searing through our hearts and devouring our souls. It is a completion; a moment of supreme epiphany at which we've realized some sublime apex of power together.

"This... This is unbelievable." It truly is, and yet I cannot envision anything more blissfully natural. I belong in her arms, soaring above all that lies beneath us; I exist to be held aloft by our love.

"I have never taken flight without you, my Beloved, since our first union." We drift with an unhurried ease through the boiling darkness, streaked with an enigmatic silver luster. I feel my heart swell with adoration unimaginable; with a sense of ever deepening rapture that rises further and further with every inch that separates us from the hopeless ordinariness of life beneath our feet.

"Never?"

"It would never be worthwhile without you, My Kimberly; what use is there in flight without a joy that makes my heart soar?" Of its own accord, a sullen groan seeps from my lips, chilled with the delicate and damp coolness of what I'm certain is the downy caress of clouds, as we descend again toward the amorphous smears of shadow below.

"Why are we landing?"

"We cannot take flight into the city any longer, my Love; long past is the time in which _Xian_ can be seen amongst ordinary men. Mankind's imagination, his wonder and sense of magic, has evaporated with the coming of a new age; the pure light of reason has devoured the silvered mystery of the past." She mourns this, as I do; a raw and rending agony that writhes through my breast, a serpent of liquid flame that scours with every slithering stroke through that core of the mystical and sublime that throbs within my heart. It seems impossibly cruel that I would return at the nadir of such wonderment, when the aching and incredulous blandness of pure physicality would arise to destroy everything that consumes me with such delight.

And we settle, with a graceful whisper of soles upon crackling shards of pebbles, mere arshins from my family's gate; it felt as if we've been aloft for hours, and yet I realize that it must have but been moments. Amid that whirling and swollen ecstasy, however, every second dilated into endless and glorious eternities that I hoped would never expire; that we would never return to this world of the common and coarse.

"Something wonderful awaits us, Kimberly." And, at once, the gentle, thrumming murmur of a motorcar resounds through the darkness; the pale, almost ethereal gleam of headlamps filters through a murky void, thick and swimming with a bewildering and molten mist. It seems impossible in its grace; little more than the most seemingly perfunctory rustle of gravel beneath its tires suggests its passage; its engine becomes no louder, never welling above that mild, almost desultory mutter.

"A motorcar?" That supremely oblivious comment inspires a sweetly delighted giggle from my companion. Her embrace continues to throb with glorious warmth around my shoulders, bracing me with her sublime and supernatural heat against the mild, damp chill that pervades the avenue.

"So it appears." It's a peculiar quirk of light and shadow, however, as it approaches; never seeming to grow larger with any natural fluidity, as if some curious and impressionistic sense of proportion that eternally reinvents itself; swelling by extraordinary degrees, as though lurching toward us in dramatic, blinking progressions. Xi Go seems distinctly amused; a heady and wondrous aura of glee wells from within her, seeming to ward off the almost palpable unease that the thrumming carriage's progression inspires. "I had not quite expected this."

"No?"

"It seems to change with each visit." My lover muses; she seems genuinely as perplexed as I by its passage. Finally, with merely the quietest and most perfunctory of murmuring groans, it coasts to a halt before us, a sudden and complete silence settling upon us as if the engine has absent-mindedly dispensed with any pretension of its signature thrum. There is no longer any doubt of its utterly singular nature; no longer can one maintain a genial delusion of its normality. The light that streams in gilded shafts from its lamps seems unperturbed by the curling mist that wreathes us, shimmering with an exotic radiance that seems to vibrate to another measure entirely, as though merely for our delight. No suggestion of its luminescence flits across the towering walls of the estate; its pure and glorious luminosity casts no shadows, as if no earthly matter can impede its blazing perfection.

"Does it?" Any further discussion is interrupted by the arrival of its driver, entirely without preamble, as if the niceties of openings its door is beneath so exalted a being as that which confronts us. Its presence is extraordinary, as if fashioned from the very essence of the divine; susurrating power writhes and ripples around it as it finally emerges into deeper and deeper definition. It appears virtually as if carved from the swirling darkness that envelops us, graven into our sight with a graceful and gradual ease as though by the hands of some transcendental sculptor.

"Good evening." Shuddering darkness at once becomes a being of complete and beauteous humanity, as if formed in the minutest blinking instant; and yet I cannot recall my eyes flickering closed for even the briefest of moments. It inspires a curious certainty that it has always existed; a peculiar and paradoxical sense of it having lingered within some distant reach of my awareness throughout every moment of my life, even though I have never before confronted anything so singular.

"I trust that you are well this evening." Our visitor's voice, a sonorous and melodious splendor glorious with a lyrical magnificence, seems to speak directly to my mind, as if beyond the reach of mere insipid physical senses. With another shimmering blink, she is beside me; I did not yet even realize that the chauffeur was a woman, and yet this knowledge again overwhelms me with a sudden and urgent intensity. She is beautiful; skin of a pallor that whispers of virgin snow, shrouded in a stately and well-tailored, regal suit that tastefully accentuates abundant and voluptuous curves. My eyes feel riveted to her, even as my sight remains upon Xi Go, as if she seeps through the very fabric of reality itself, a ubiquitous and unearthly presence eternally commanding my attention.

"Yes, we are." Xi Go's answer seems to suggest that this curious being is as ordinary as any chauffeur, even as her boots of purest, opaque midnight fail to grace the crackling gravel with even the most cursory caress.

"That is wonderful, Mistress. Please, let me help you aboard." Our chauffeur scrapes with the utmost deference with hardly the subtlest suggestion of a bow; merely the mildest incline of churning and whirling ebon striated with such lustrous bone-white, every graceful movement almost exaggeratedly intense in its reserve and solemnity. At once, without even a single step, I find myself beside the sedan, even as I remain certain that we stood an extraordinary distance from it; in another blink, a hand of liquid ice, blazing with a warmth that sends a molten current of electric excitement through me, fastens upon my own.

My sight cannot register fingers of fine ivory that I know briefly guide me toward the carriage of this most peculiar conveyance; I cannot recall a door opening, even as a quiet rattle of steel signals its closure; a sudden and thunderingly silent roar of an engine that exists as assuredly as it does not pervades my senses. I reel with the all-consuming contradiction of these sensations; the delicate shiver that trembles through my seat with a lurching swell of motion as we sit with perfect stillness; an impossibly radiant glare of silvered splendor flooding through windows opaque to the trickling of muted and and drab light that barely struggles through a boiling mist.

"This... This is extraordinary." My voice finally returns to permit me to marvel aloud at the utter, astonishing oddity of what encircles us. The curious presence of the chauffeur endures in my sight, even as I have no doubt that we are completely alone within this cabin redolent with an almost baffling luxury. The seats seem fashioned from finest silk, yielding with a tenderness that seems deliberately molded to every gentle contour of my body; glistening streaks of interlaced gold and silver embrace rods of wondrous and untarnished ivory, inset within exotic woods, richly varnished, that seem drawn from impossible trees sprouting in soil not of this world. They're radiant with a dark luster, a mirrored sheen that reflects nothing but a singular supernatural light of its own.

"It is." Xi Go's presence is more powerful than anything, as if amplified by the mystic enormity of what encircles us; her glorious, dulcet tones seem to resound, enjoined in a majestic dance that whirls and streaks through my senses, every word a caress of beauty that sends prickling tears lunging into my eyes.

"This... This is magic." An affirmation that pleads for a true answer, for a deeper explanation of this transcendental grandeur.

"Yes, it is." My love's characteristic crypticness. "It is magic, my Love."

"What... What is it, however? How is this possible?" I reel at this thrall of the surreal, every sense cloaked in a gauzy haze of disorientation, despite the singular clarity that seems to shear with an unrestrained ferocity through what appears merely the illusory patina of this reality.

"I do not know; this is magic beyond a mortal's ken, beyond the reach of the physical. It is purely of the ethereal, of a heavenly splendor that defies explanation as surely as does the meaning of a sparrow's call." However abjectly that should frustrate me to be deprived of any understanding of this magnificence, it does not; it seems virtually a liberation to realize that I need not be bothered with the fundamentally human struggle to grasp this as anything but what it is. It delights me, now, more so than I could ever have envisaged as I strove to seize it with the clumsy embrace of my thinking mind; it is but magic. A vast and serene smile settles upon my lips at that, and I lean into Xi Go's sheltering embrace, swathed in that sense of contented wonderment.

"It's wonderful. Who is that woman?" It feels as if the chauffeur should reply, that niggling sense of her enduring presence offers nothing but an extraordinary sense of virtual omnipresence.

"_Xianju_." It seems less a name and more an emanation of divine power.

"_Xianju_?"

"She has no other name; she is not truly a 'she', in any event, but adores a beauteous form. She is most vain." Spoken with a mild and quirking amusement that seems virtually to elicit a silent and unmistakable grumble of protest from amid that curious, throbbing murmur of the engine

"Is this another service owed to you, _Shego_?" I've begun to suspect that my love commands the forces of the heavens as surely as she does my own adoration, of such power that even the chariot of the divine is at her disposal.

"Not quite. _Xianju_ is not beholden to me, or to anyone; she adores us, however, having lived amongst us at varying moments for centuries. We have traveled together, and she delights in the certainty of adventure in our midst."

"It's extraordinary." I find myself remarking with an almost aching vacuity, but there truly is no hope of even beginning to approach the enormity of this glorious magic with anything so prosaic as mere words. I'm consumed with a shivering excitement at the thought of being within an entity of pure magic, this singular parody of the ordinary cast from the most incredible of presences.

"It is." With a gentle and languorous stroke of a finger, my attention is at once drawn toward one of the windows; luminous and vibrant moonlight has receded in the face of the true essence of what surrounds us. Astonishingly, at once, the throbbing and primal rhythm of the city arises as if a volcanic eruption; it's overpowering, the singular and seething enormity of life that wells into sudden and riotous existence. It seems a study in chaos, a calamity of bodies streaming in impossibly fluid crushes, joining and burgeoning before diverging and streaming away as though babbling rivers of humanity.

I find myself fastened against this ethereal portal, baring to me everything with a luminous clarity that exposes wholly its supreme, livid and sensuous intensity; grime and filth meld with finery exquisite; clothing of a multichromatic radiance, a peacock's avid and ostentatious flamboyance, joined with drab and sullen banality; aching, cringing wretches of unfathomable poverty mingle and jostle against regal apparitions of stately sumptuousness. I devour this eclectic buffet, eyes unblinking as Xi Go eases beside me, delighting in my naïve consumption of the spectacle that confronts us; her own deep and beauteous sloe absorbs it with the patient understanding of a true connoisseur, even as I inhale it with the ravenous abandon of a gourmand.

"_Shego_... This... This is incredible." Seething arcs of luminous neon join blistering vermillion lanterns, casting impossible and multifaceted shadows that set the whirling tides of life into implausible and almost uncannily stark relief; crimson plays upon the drab concrete of the occidental and utilitarian, even as it caresses with equally avid glee the column and colonnades of vast, sprawling and intricate Chinese facades.

"This is Shanghai, Kimberly." Those words seem to thunder as if wreathed in lightning intensity; it seems an almost uncanny revelation. I can scarcely reconcile this with the glimpses of solemn streets, even so suffocatingly drenched with bowed and reserved humanity; even the shadows, choked with innumerable urchins and sinister wraiths of the night, seem to shiver with an intangible energy vibrating through my very soul.

"It's... It's nothing like Russia." It's not; the stately orderliness of Saint Petersburg bears no resemblance whatsoever to this unrestrained fulmination; it's as if life has simply been unleashed within Shanghai, shuddering and straining with its own uncontrollable sensuousness, eternally immersed in some hedonistic thrall.

"No?"

"Saint Petersburg was so calm, from what I remember. This... This seems impossible. How can there be so many people?" And motorcars, and rickshaws, and velocipedes, and everything imaginable; they career together, melding into a single, churning cohesion of raw intensity.

"It is China, Kimberly; there are hundreds of millions of people in this land." It feels as if every one of them has visited Shanghai this evening to greet us.

"Where are we going, _Shego_?" I find myself babbling with an avid intensity that I could never have expected, given the dread and sullen irritation with which I first greeted her gift. Even with the tortured and swollen arousal that continues to churn with an urgent and commanding craving within the pit of my stomach, I find myself consumed by an electric, soaring glee at what confronts us. And, all the more astoundingly, I am not afraid; the swollen hordes seem virtually to accentuate a sense of unaccountable security, as though this is some grand and flourishing playground.

"What do you mean, Kimberly?" She seems, again, distinctly amused; her words are pregnant with a subdued anticipation, as if the fullest height of the surprise has yet to be revealed.

"Will we see everything?" I haven't even the remotest inkling of how vastly Shanghai unfolds; glancing about us, it seems as if the horizon of bodies terminates mere inches from the motorcar, even as a skyline of soaring immensity suggests a sprawling infinity.

"I'm afraid that even an immortal might not see everything within Shanghai if given a million years, Kimberly." My lover delivers that with a virtually reverential laugh, tempered with a subtle uneasiness. "And, I do not believe that everything would be to your taste."

"I- I suppose not." I cannot dwell upon my cringing naïvete for greater than a few moments. I understand, even in my supreme unworldliness, that a city is a repository of unutterable sin; that degradation and salvation join hands and clash for its denizens' souls with a riotous fury.

"But, this, I'm certain, will; it might seem impossibly alien, and it is not altogether Chinese, but I'm sure that you will love it." There remains no suggestion of our destination within those beauteous tones that caress my senses, soothing them and placing the shattering clamor of the countless masses into temporary abeyance.

"Will I?" A beat. "What do you mean that it's not altogether Chinese?"

"Well, this is the Bund; the European district, and the most fashionable upon the waterfront." Which is barely in evidence amongst this shivering eruption of life. It's challenging to even visualize within this swimming ocean of darkness, curious fauna in suits and rags drifting through the lurid light cast by its peculiar luminous flora, that this is the city into which my family and I were delivered mere weeks ago.

"What is there to do here?" Beyond merely admiring and marveling at the savage theater in which countless miniature dramas rage, clamoring for my suddenly frayed attention.

"Everything." An answer that seems somehow to capture succinctly the very essence of the peculiar, dark, and unfathomable emotion that susurrates and screams in bizarre and jarring simultaneity around us. "Everything, My Kimberly. I will not lie; Shanghai is the most dangerous city on earth, as much as it is the most diverse and exotic. Terrible, terrible things transpire here at every second; peril stalks sinister alleys and monsters in human guise exist only to torment. But, there is absolutely transcendental beauty; you can find destruction and salvation here in equal measure."

"It's extraordinary." This is not Saint Petersburg; this is not the genial and upright, patrician paradise, of rigid imported order, in which one would savor tranquil delights beneath the stolid and grandiose shadow of Kazan Cathedral. I find myself at once repulsed and awed; consumed by a visceral disgust that shivers through my very core, even as I cannot bear to be separated from it for the briefest of moments. It's as though Shanghai has infected me; a throbbing and writhing fever that flushes through my body and mind, refusing to quit my soul, even following these brief minutes.

"Are you glad that I had taken you, my Love?" A molten wave of utter rapture devours me at the rich and velveteen caress of her deep, sultry whisper against my ear; she has eased beside me, our seats somehow shifting parallel to the windows that line the flank of this most extraordinary carriage. The lithe and lovely warmth of her arms have fastened around me; she crushes me to her sublime heat, immersing me in the incomparable sensual delights of her embrace, even as my senses are invaded by what lies without our motorcar.

"I..." That phrasing ignites a further welter of mad and manic ecstasy within me. "I am." A struggling wisp of a gasp that I can barely wring from my suddenly arid throat. "I am. Can... Can we really be out this evening? Do my parents know?"

"Of course not, my Beloved." Another dark and breathy chuckle that resonates through the full and voluptuous glory of her chest. "Of course not. This is our secret; our indulgence that is only for us, Kimberly."

"It..." It feels somehow dangerous; desperately, outrageously dangerous. Not merely are we delighting in our forbidden and eternal love amid that curious and idyllic garden menagerie, but my lover has now ushered me away from the sheltering and innocent security of the household entirely into the perils of the city. "You're corrupting me, my Love." I'm astonished by the low and smoldering voice that I only belatedly recognize as my own; the gentle, prickling strain of Xi Go's fingers upon my bare arms seems to affirm that such startlement is not merely my own.

"Perhaps I am." A thoroughly hoarse and breathless murmur that inspires a sudden and lurching craving for her lips; the churning and violent enormity of Shanghai evaporates before the incomparable, divine beauty of my love. I claim her; her mouth, sweet and yielding, is drunk as if the most singular wine. Only when the saloon grinds to a sudden and jarring halt do I release her, and merely grudgingly; I feel a curious and almost jealous glower shiver across my skin.

"_S-Shego_?" I gasp for the peculiar and perfumed perfection of this air; it seems as though the essence of the garden, distilled to a purity transcending anything but the sublime aroma of our joined love. "Why have we stopped?"

"We've arrived, my Love." Even Xi Go seems perhaps a bit vexed at our sudden halt; her brow creases with a subtle aggravation.

"Where are we?" I find my sight being led to what lies beyond this mystic saloon; it's a savage, fulminating energy eclipsing what I could ever possibly have envisioned, even from my glimpse of the throbbing enormity of the life rioting about the streets. Innumerable motorcars of bewildering extravagance, pallid and luminous shades of brilliant marble seeming to flicker beneath shivering streetlamps and the swaying lanterns that droop from a bewilderingly expansive awning that overhangs what I've no doubt is our destination.

"Our destination, Kimberly." I'd be astounded if we could even exit for the ferocious crush of bodies that writhes beyond us; and yet they seem of an increasingly uniform sort. Fewer of the poor and dismal wraiths, their feet dragging with a famished enervation that renders skin ashen and awful beneath their drooping rags seem in evidence; even the meanest amongst them appears somehow dapper and well-heeled. A certain shred of my soul is repulsed by the exaggerated and terrible extremes of wealth upon such conspicuous and seemingly frivolous display, even as my eyes avidly swallow the liquid beauty that streams through the streets.

Gorgeous women of every sort, shapely and full and lithe and refined, slink with feline elegance amongst innumerable gentlemen; they appear inexorably lured toward the expansive bank of massive crimson doors, striated with gilded magnificence and textured with what seems a rippling sea of fine spines that rise into relief above the intricate carvings. I realize that a dragon unfolds across their span; monstrous, snarling statues of impossible, demonic dogs or wolves roar in silent fury at the guests as they surmount a gracefully sweeping staircase of glorious stone. It seems as if a temple, and yet the masses that throng it, palpably rippling with a sensuous energy, do not seem convulsed with religious devotion.

"What is this place, _Shego_?" I do not recognize the elegant and sweeping calligraphy that scrolls along silken banners that droop precipitously above boiling oceans of oil that flare with a vermillion flame through blackness that seems designed to dramatically silhouette this cathedral of hedonism.

"The Red Dragon, Kimberly." A slim and lovely finger gesticulates to the exotic and bewilderingly intricate figures that writhe along the vermillion banners in a stark raven; I've yet to even begin to approach anything so intricate as Chinese writing, and it awes me with its unhurried aesthetic majesty, as if its beauty supersedes even the import of the words themselves.

"The Red Dragon?" It seems somehow appropriate; the whole of the structure seems a momentous, mythic beast, yawning doors its vast maw, agape to capture with a greedy delight the streaming torrent of patrons. "What is it?"

"Wouldn't you rather experience it for yourself, my Love?" A gentle chuckle as her lithe and lovely fingers fasten upon my wrist, gently drawing me toward a door that unaccountably seems so very distant. It parts with a silent grace without even a single touch, and that peculiar and ethereal beauty materializes beside us as we emerge into the night alight with a truly extraordinary and indescribable energy. A furious and arcing electricity seems to coruscate with lightning intensity between everyone amid that momentous crushing throng; it soars through me, lifting this thrill to a measure virtually unfathomable.

"Will- will she be joining us?" Even as I glance away from the sleek darkness of the saloon and toward The Red Dragon, _Xianju_ remains within my sight; eyes of raw, seething and untextured darkness devour me with virtually a possessive ferocity, and I am unable to stifle a gasp of utter startlement.

"_Xianju_? No; she cannot without invitation, and I would not wish to mislead her. I fear that she tends to develop certain... Notions." Xi Go concludes with a vaguely sullen irritation, as if she fears that _Xianju_'s supernatural splendor could conceivably aspire to wrest my unyielding adoration from her.

"I love you, _Shego_. My _Shego_." I accentuate with a fervent proprietariness of my own, sight darting briefly to _Xianju_, whose elegant and graceful form looms forth in sudden and impossible enormity, as though she stands beside us again. "We've such an unusual chauffeur."

"She is certainly quite remarkable, however frustrating she can be." A low and aggrieved rumble of the engine thrums above even the upraised and jumbled babel of innumerable voices in as many tongues.

"What is there to do at The Red Dragon, _Shego_?" She offers me her arms with a chivalrous flair, and I claim it without an instant's hesitation; I notice that many women are intertwined as we are, of an extraordinary range of ages and nationalities. There seems to be no greater notice offered them than any other, and I feel myself easing nearer and nearer to her until we seem virtually to meld into one; her warmth throbs and palpitates through me, swaddling me against the periodic, curling breeze that bears a damp and electric springtime chill.

"You love to dance, don't you, Kimberly?" And the first, exotic strains of music, boiling in desultory and languorous currents, reach me; they whisper through the streaming masses, men in suits and women bedecked in a wondrous and startlingly revealing assortment of fashionable gowns in a multichromatic explosion.

"I do." The music is barely familiar, however; rather than the level, regular strains of comfortable and venerable favorites, it throbs and pulsates with a thundering beat that seems so very alien. "I... I don't think I've ever danced to this, though."

"Then you'll learn." Spoken with a swollen and delicious promise as we begin to surmount the steps; the music intensifies, beginning to fill my very soul with its deft and electrifying tempo.

"Is this jazz?" It seems a perfectly silly question, but, stepping through that threshold, suddenly consumed by the blazing presence of the music that seems to ripple in flaming currents through the vast and ornate hall that unfolds before us, that's the sole word that lunges into my mind: _le jazz hot_.

"Indeed, my Love." I'm astounded by what we confront. It's a glimpse of an emperor's impossibly sumptuous palace; a vast central floor blossoms from beneath the uppermost tiers, draped in banners that drift and flutter upon invisible currents and the trickling, acrid plumes of smoke that well from the countless tables scattered with seemingly haphazard casualness about the hall. Massive crimson pillars in robust stone rise with priapic enormity toward the ceiling, supporting balconies groaning with the enormity of their occupants; oceans of black suits and exotically colored dresses; a vast and suggestive profusion of bared skin, creamy and dark, seemingly spanning the full constellation of the city's residents.

Countless jumbled fragrances wash across us; cigarettes clash with cloying melanges of perfume; astounding and sublimely aromatic meals meld with the raw essence of humanity that hangs in a perennial mist around us. We're jostled with brusque apathy from guests darting to and fro, greeting one another with exultant shouts and rapturous gesticulations; an unremitting, quailing torrent of voices barely struggles above the music that thunders from the emperors that preside over this havoc. A band in stunning ivory suits channel that heaving and mystical presence in thundering percussion and exotic, playful melody; I'm astonished that there are blacks and whites amongst them, promiscuously mingling without a single thought of civilization and station.

And, indeed, men and women of countless races dwell amongst the guests themselves; Chinese, those of fashion and wealth, are in astonishing profusion, freely joining with the whites that nonetheless, in their abundance, drape virtually the whole of the club in an ethnic monochrome.

"This... This is extraordinary." I am astounded; my inner voice freely proclaims its gibbering excitement through our bond, as I know that there would be no hope of any words spoken aloud being heard. "This is The Red Dragon?"

"It is, Kimberly. Should we find a table?" And she ushers me through a fierce throng that parts as if the Red Sea to accommodate us with barely the slightest inkling of why; I can feel the power radiating from my love, rippling in momentous and irresistible rivers that lash into anything that bars our passage. It floods from me, as well, I realize; more powerful, perhaps, with this almost bleary, ecstatic mist of pure exultation.

"This is absolutely amazing." This is assuredly, from my mother's perspective, a paragon of sin; women droop from men in dazed and dizzy intoxication, lustrous and glistening champagne bottles littering tables as if vodka before a tortured drunkard. It flows in veritable deluges from great magnums; at the distant periphery, a massive bar, tended by an impressive array of men who resemble great penguins, is thronged by the lords and ladies alike of Shanghai, in various states of dissoluteness.

It is liquid hedonism, and it throbs through my veins with a palpitating rapture; every pulse seems to affirm that I've sundered those oppressive threads that bind me to my parents, to that stultifying and artificial purity that smothers the spirit and robs the soul of color and life. Upon our table, I notice an impressive clutch of champagne, towering flutes that seem more suited to kvass than that foreign curiosity beckoning us.

"Have you ever tasted champagne, Kimberly?" Somehow, Xi Go's voice swells above that thumping percussion and the steely strains of the music.

"Have I? I... I've never even tasted kvass." That admission is joined by a flaring flush that I quickly realize is a matter of the utmost ridiculousness as a brief, hollow blast shatters that one enduring shard of childhood. "Really?"

"Of course." I thrill at her smile of utter, blazing jubilation as currents of that fulminating liquor flood across the bottle, coating slim fingers and geysering into the flutes. It seems as if alcohol is the currency of this eternal revelry, and, as I begin to partake of it, I start at the sudden strains of a harshly inflected voice from behind me.

"Yoo wan' anythin'else to drin'?" It's a Chinese; as I turn, I discover a stout man in a tuxedo, shoulders virtually broader than his height, a slender arc of a scar tracing extraordinarily dark features presently consumed by a ghoulish rictus grin.

"We're fine." Nevertheless, Xi Go seems to conjure a massive heap of pound notes from the ether, depositing one into his outstretched hand; a brief glance yields that it's one-hundred pounds. He departs without another word; the novelty of the monstrous wealth of British currency immediately becomes the focus of my attention, though I find Xi Go's slim fingers fastening upon my wrist.

"What is it?" A delicate and subtle gesture directs my attention to the course of our waiter, such as he was; rather than returning to the bar, or any other table, he begins to drift toward a distant, smoke-wreathed darkness that my eyes pierce with a sudden and extraordinary clarity. It lies beyond the common floor, perhaps ten arshins or so away from our table, slightly above the momentous throng of diners and drinkers.

"Do you see that man?" I follow the delicately angular, manicured peak of Xi Go's nail to the waiter's ultimate destination, eyes narrowing to further appreciate what lurks within the penumbra.

"I do." He's slight, seemingly feeble, an enormous pair of ears jutting from a profoundly ordinary face; luminous silk drapes him as if a Mandarin, and I discover, with appreciably greater interest, a virtual harem of women of extraordinary beauty. Diverse and exotic, pale and dark alike, they're united by features of astonishing finery; silken manes brush along slender shoulders bared to the curious smoke that wreathes him, the slim peak of a pipe clutched in gnarled hands.

"That's Du Yuesheng." I've the curious sense that Xi Go is now my tour guide, introducing me to the exotic and peculiar denizens of the city as assuredly as its stunning architecture. The waiter bows with a scraping deference as he approaches, before a brief and rather terse exchange sees him depositing the hundred-pound note before the Mandarin.

"Du Yuesheng?" Which is perhaps as meaningless as Grand Duke Nikolaievich for Xi Go. "Who is that? And why is he surrounded by so many women?" I ask with a supreme childishness that sends my jaws grinding with a tortured and cringing vexation.

"Du Yuesheng is one of the most powerful men in Shanghai." She speaks that without judgment, and assuredly without the reverence that the waiter displayed toward the man.

"Oh." A beat. "Is he royalty?"

"Hardly. He's a criminal, albeit a powerful one; a brute who's been very, very fortunate with _Qing Bang_. He'll probably be its chief soon."

"Why is he allowed here?" I feel a bit indignant to even be in the presence, however distant, of such a man. "What is the _Qing Bang_?"

"The... It's a guild of thieves, I suppose; they control the city's crime. They have a mythical and storied history, but they're the lowest dregs, now. I've had dealings with their secret society before they went rotten."

"Truly? But, why is he here?"

"He owns The Red Dragon; he owns every nightclub of any worth in the city." My attention is at once drawn, with a curious azure streak of activity flaring through my peripheral vision, to a cluster of men that surround him; I barely noticed them originally, but I suddenly understand why they seem so familiar. They're enormous; they soar above Du and his women, black and white suits accentuating pale features stern with unsmiling visages and streaked with savage scars. They're Russians; they could only be, and I have no doubt as I, with such extraordinary clarity, perceive the unmistakable flicker of lips with that familiar tongue.

"Why is he looking at us?" It feels unnerving; his eyes are, I realize, diseased. They crawl with a sickly and awful energy that throbs the deepest burgundy with some gruesome and unspeakable passion.

"The hundred pounds; he'll make sure that no one bothers us tonight, and that we have the best service." The tenderest of smiles alights upon my love's beauteous, creamy features, the delicate warmth of her fine fingers settling upon my wrists. "I just thought that a bit of local color might interest you, my Love; I hope that you're not upset."

"No. No." I couldn't possibly be more emphatic, devouring the glorious delight that embraces my senses with such a wondrous intensity. "Absolutely not. He's a bit unnerving, though."

"You can sense it; you're beginning to see auras even without concentrating, aren't you, my lovely adept?"

"I suppose that I am; when they're that powerful, it's a bit difficult not to notice." They throb and palpitate with a bewildering enormity; blazing colors that swell above the banal and neutral grayness of the bulk of the patrons. Merely very, very few offer anything beyond that monochrome; even then, they're hardly of that massiveness.

"Soon, Kimberly; soon." And, with that, I find myself being swept from my seat without even a single experimental sip of that liquid gold that entices me away from what remains of that sheltered childhood.

"W-what are you doing, _Shego_?" With the gentlest but most irresistible of pressure, I realize that I'm being dragged toward the dance floor; at once, a thundering and roaring percussion begins to hammer within my chest, molten fear soaring in dramatic, sanguine arcs through my body. "I- I can't dance to this. I haven't danced to anything but the Waltz in ages." Even then, I can't quite conceive of it having been so modern; this rhythm is positively terrifying, erratic and thrumming with a wild and unpredictable life.

"You'll love it, Kimberly; trust me." She cajoles, and I'm plunged into a breathless and terrified dance that leaves me positively alight with a shuddering excitement. My skin blazes; cheeks flushed to scarlet radiance glimmer with a fine and delicate sheen of sweat; legs and hands thrash and play with an extraordinary, darting intensity. I can feel the beat pounding through me, coruscating with a molten fury that streams through our wondrous nexus of jade; it shivers within my breast, unfolding through my limbs as if a rippling flower, tugging me with the most sublime coordination with every lash of its petals. Xi Go, I realize, is guiding me; or aiding me, in any event, pressing me further and further toward an utter perfection.

"I love it!" I do; my squealing shout wells above even the music for a moment. It's as if, amidst this extraordinary sea of bodies, Xi Go and I are well and truly alone; apart from and above what seems mere mortals, transcendental in supernatural grace and elegance. We dart and sway with an unfathomable alacrity; I realize that it seems as if time has obligingly slowed itself to accommodate this blissful moment. Our eyes remain locked; luminous, shimmering sloe suffused further and further with that majestic and captivating, passionate emerald, reflecting the jade cast of my own eyes; we drift further and further together, teasing and playful, beautiful and lovely; lips brush with the most ephemeral of caresses, a forbidden and sublime embrace that yields a blazing streak of flame in its wake.

"I love you." The music halts at once, and I discover that I'm yearning for it to continue without cessation, to pulsate and sing with its libidinous intensity until everyone but Xi Go and I collapse with exhaustion. My strength is limitless; I can endure until the sun falls from the sky and the world ceases to be.

"I love you, My Kimberly." I avail myself of this sudden stillness to admire her, to ease away, however achingly cruel the distance, to claim a full and uninterrupted glimpse of her supernatural and uneclipsed radiance beneath the furious gleam of the chandeliers that blaze overhead.

A brief, jolting collision with a fragrant and yielding warmth, a quiet groan of pain, and the quiet thump of something truly dreadful upon the floor forces me to turn with a sudden, panicked welter of apology. I've stricken, apparently with positively unmoderated strength, one of the other guests; a lurid scarlet gown slithers with serpentine suggestiveness across full and brazen curves, a steep slit baring creamy legs that trail seemingly without end toward feet clasped in a pair of vermillion heels. My hand instinctively lashes out to claim the woman's own, a curtain of deep chestnut shrouding her features; she seems to levitate as a mild pressure hoists my lamentable and unintended victim to her full height, bewilderingly above my own.

"I- I'm so sorry about that. I'm just so clumsy, and-" A miserably mortified stammer issues from my lips in German, and I prepare a further battery of apologies in every language that I can conjure until, amid a flicker of silver earrings, a lithe and graceful gilded necklace dipping toward full breasts accentuated by an obscenely plunging neckline, deep auburn eyes capture my own. My mouth works with a fevered panic even as those dark russet pools narrow with a tortured recognition.

"Kimberly." Rouged lips, full and familiar, caress my name with a frightfully fierce certainty.

"A-Ariadne?"


	13. Slave

"A-Ariadne?" That name, that impossible and torturous name that resounds and throbs with a heaving, tumultuous, aching grief; that name that shivers with a cruel abandonment; that name that shudders with a fear and anxiety that I was certain had flowed soundlessly into the distant, dark waters of memory, never again to well with such urgent and horrific intensity into my life. That name whispers from my lips as if the essence of some monstrous deity, resurgent in bestial triumph. Even with this surging tidal torrent of dread, even amid this resurrection of a dead and distant history, I struggle to deny it; to dissolve any sense of recognition of the deep, penetrating auburn that confronts me; of the voluminous fall of chestnut silk that plays along familiar, pale shoulders; the full and voluptuous femininity that I can barely reconcile with a vanished childhood.

My suddenly tortured and reeling mind forces itself to fixate upon that utter surreality; the singular impossibility of the creature of ribald and irrepressible sensuality before me, abundant curves and soaring beauty, being the girl that embraced me throughout those quaking evenings of subdued passion and fervent, repressed yearning, lips so torturously near as hearts drifted so close to a complete, syncopating union.

"Kimberly." Her reply at once shatters that armoring veneer of denial as if the frailest of crystal; it seems to tinkle with a hideous, fragile shriek of failure, lacerating shards rending at that desperately fortified doubt and rejection. Ariadne speaks to me in Russian; deeper, breathier, a sultry and almost exaggeratedly lurid sensuality permeating every syllable. Beneath that, however, lies an icy and brutal accusation; I realize that it is not the voice that I recall; it cannot be the Ariadne that I remember, even with a familiar timbre and rhythm of her elegant and patrician speech. "Kimberly Dmitriovna."

I wish to weep at that; to collapse to my knees, to claw at my chest, to wail and scream and recede into myself. I'm terrified; consumed by an abject and all-encompassing, awesome torment that gnaws at my very soul, that shreds through my mind with a demon's diseased talons.

"A-Ariadne." I repeat, again, though cruelly destitute of even the slightest lingering vestige of doubt. Innumerable thoughts rage through my mind: brief flickers of yearning, of peculiar and nebulous traces of warm and tender sentiments; a sense of raging, raw animosity that had seemingly forgotten me, that not once had she deigned to call upon me in Shanghai; a hate that she has returned, that such a powerful specter, continuing to tug upon those tortured threads of writhing emotion that remain, however brittle, fastened to my heart. At once, a quailing and panicked yearning for Xi Go overtakes me; I long to be beside her, for her to take me in her arms, to shelter me from this awful apparition.

She does not; perhaps she has heard even that low, gasping caress of her name. Perhaps she has sought to afford us a moment of reunion alone; perhaps she already doubts my sincerity in the face of this revenant. Perhaps she has not even noticed.

"Kimberly Dmitriovna." Rouged and voluptuous lips capture again that awful relic with a subdued fury. "Kimberly Dmitriovna." Startlingly, I realize that my hand remains fastened to hers; that I've yet to release those slim and graceful, delicate fingers amid this thrall of utter, agonized bewilderment; she refuses to relax her grip, and I find myself being tugged nearer and nearer to her suddenly frightful beauty. "I had never expected to see you in Shanghai." Spoken with a sudden welter of malice that convulses me with a quaking and irrational horror; the accumulated enormity of my power, of my cultivation, of this immortal's strength abandons me at once, and I am again Kimberly Dmitriovna, shivering in her arms in whimpering, infantile torment.

"A-Ariadne-"

"Do not say anything to me, Kimberly Dmitriovna." I do not understand the pure, molten hatred that consumes her voice; that renders it ferocious, ragged stone against which I feel as if my very spirit is being dashed, a tempest-tossed ship pulverized into hopeless shards. Tears prickle unaccountably at my eyes; a scalding, hissing mist that blurs the miserable and strained scowl that confronts me, that melds inseparably with the distant traces of memory that well irrepressibly from that which was Kimberly Dmitriovna. Full lips, dark with rouge, drift upon gentle, pink rosebuds; narrowed, accusing eyes intertwined with beauteous and tender oceans of delicate russet; a body budding into graceful blossom melds with the abundant flower of womanhood before me.

I wish to weep, and yet the cringing pressure upon my hand permits nothing but a low, keening mewl; a silent, pining prayer for liberation, for absolution, for release from this infernal suffering that has enveloped us as if the fires of perdition. This woman no longer seems Ariadne; a furious and superstitious sense that she's been possessed, or that a demon has claimed a terrible and cruel parody of her form, becomes a life preserver amid this babbling ocean of liquid torment. This cannot be the girl that I had... That I had adored; that was so passionately devoted to me, even with such a naïve and childish distance.

"Who is this, Kimberly?" As if the gilded rays of a divine host, the glorious and sonorous strains of Xi Go's voice pierce this whirling darkness that has begun to fasten further and further around us; a curtain of toxic and ghastly midnight dissolves beneath the luminous majesty of my love's arrival. Ariadne, however, refuses to relinquish her grasp upon my hand; a savage and crushing pressure of sleekly manicured nails raises fine, beading peaks of warmth that threaten to wring a gasp of anguish from my tautly pursed lips.

"_S-Shego_, this-"

"My name is Ariadne." She interrupts in typically flawless German, those words the leaden slab of a crypt thundering into place, sealing me within this shivering hell; they seethe with a barely restrained rage, a vicious and monstrous indignation at the rupture of this terrible trance into which she has thrust me.

"Ariadne? It is a pleasure to meet you. My name is _Shego_." Despite this thrall, I cannot restrain the wondrous and beatific smile that such a glorious and intimate pronunciation of her exalted name invokes; it unfolds in tandem with the majestic, molten flower of warmth whose seething petals scour away the icy terror that has gripped my heart.

"Who are you, if I may ask?" Ariadne is transparently upset; a brief glance yields a raging anger boiling with her dark gaze, fulminating at the thought of having been interrupted in this truly predatory grasp, as if a lioness upon the brink of an unspeakable meal.

"Might I ask you the same?" Xi Go is furious; that certainty coruscates through the transcendental jade nexus that binds us. A molten relief, however, washes through me at the knowledge that she is not with me; that she will not abandon me for this unexpected and undesired reunion; that she will not scorn me for what felt so strongly of a terrible and unforgivable infidelity even in acknowledging this enduring memory.

"Should you not introduce yourself, Miss _Shego_?" Another irate, snapping retort, spitting my beloved's name as if the foulest insult.

"I am Kimberly's wife." A shivering delight coruscates through my very soul, even as a sudden and almost unreasoning terror overtakes me at the thought that Ariadne's parents may be in contact with my own; that this sublime revelation will sour into a nightmare exposure.

"Her wife? How intriguing; how very amusing. What a very interesting and perverse delusion, Miss _Shego_." Ariadne actually laughs; a bitter and penetrating rattle of ragged blades, scouring across every nerve. "How perfectly entertaining."

"Might I ask why this amuses you so immensely? And I would appreciate it if you would release Kimberly's hand if you are not dancing." A steely and unyielding patience, barely restraining a savage and lacerating edge that threatens to emerge at even the most innocuous provocation.

"Because you clearly cannot be; Kimberly is a proper and upstanding lady, is she not?" A vicious and terrible grin creases ruby lips; Ariadne's cheeks are drawn with a vicious tension, even as another low and mocking chuckle resounds from the very depths of her throat, harsh and biting. "That would be a terrible scandal. A true lady would never surrender to such sinful passions, would she?" I feel an awful accusation in that, her sudden glower lancing into my breast.

"I believe that you are mistaken, Ariadne."

"I think not. Perhaps you should leave and allow us to-"

"Release Kimberly's hand this instant, Ariadne. I do not know who you are, but-"

"Do not presume to order me, you disgusting oriental whore." And I feel my patience snapping; every trace of infantile reticence, of retiring and fragile girlishness, crumbles beneath the weight of those pernicious words.

"How dare you-"

"How dare you?" Ariadne interrupts Xi Go again, even as an unutterable wave of ferocious power begins to well from within my lover; her grip upon my hand has intensified further, though I barely perceive the relentless, grinding agony of bone upon bone amid this delirious and wrenching haze of vermillion rage. My lips work ineffectually, merely a pitiful and subdued wheeze emerging as an inner flame soars to a blistering pyre; stirring harsh and lashing winds into an irrepressible hurricane, it seems to raise my blood to a steaming boil, a straining and irresistible pressure forming within my limbs.

"How dare you speak to me in such a fashion, you slut? Do not think for a moment that another Chinese cunt will be missed if-" I do not understand why that awful and impermissible wave of evil has stilled, folding upon itself and dissolving into the malicious pool from which it springs that now lies within Ariadne, until I realize that my palm throbs with a rending agony; it feels as if blazed within a furnace, a shivering and prickling numbness beginning to overtake that scalding fury.

"Be silent." How can that voice be my own? Ariadne appears as incredulous as I as that epiphany strikes me; it does not tremble, as level and unwavering as Krupp steel, even as my mind convulses with a directionless and uncontrollable rage that threatens to spring from the outstretched hand that lingers beside Ariadne's reddening cheek. "Be silent, Ariadne; do not dare ever to insult her again."

"I hate you, Kimberly." Her own hand snaps upon my cheek; it phases me as acutely as a fly does a whale, even as I feel unremitting and remorseless blows rained upon me, before my fingers fasten around a suddenly brittle and tremulous wrist. "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you." She weeps; a brittle facade shatters into feeble shards, enormous, bulging oceans of tears springing into vast and goggling eyes. I reel at that; those scalding tracts of liquid agony blaze through this iron shell as if acid.

"Why are you doing this?" It emerges as a plea, a desperate and pining exhortation for any explanation. I'm dazed, whirling with an utter, disoriented bafflement at the events of the past several minutes; it's as if time has dilated without notice, agonies and animosities burgeoning with unaccountable vastness with unheard insult.

"You have betrayed me, Kimberly. You... I hate you." I will not release her; Xi Go looms immensely in the fringes of my sight, the warmth and tenderness of her presence engulfing me with ungrudging encouragement. The awareness of some unfathomable grief overtakes me as reality abruptly lapses into gray relief, Ariadne consumed with a writhing and terrible, angry and tortured scarlet; fine, gauzy filaments of azure intertwined with that crimson core, and yet it does not feel as Maria's does. Liquid, rippling tendrils of pain, deeper and more unutterably awful than anything I could hope to envisage, throb and lash from the boiling core of her spirit; tears begin to mist across my own vision at the torture that pulsates through my breast, as if she has begun to inflict that raw and unendurable anguish upon me.

"Ariadne, I..." Words cannot begin to capture the nebulous and abstract awfulness of these impossible emotions; it's as if the voice of some terrible and alien creature streaks between us, upraised in a quailing howl of outrage and torture. "Please."

"Kimberly..." The dulcet loveliness of Xi Go's whisper is a trickle of luminous gold through that tormented darkness.

"Lemme go." Ariadne commands in Russian, fierce and suddenly ablaze with a vulgar, harsh fury. "Let go'a my fucking hand."

"A-Ariadne, please-"

"Get'cher fucking hand offa me, Kimberly." I start, finding myself frozen at the sudden and bewildering betrayal of every memory of her; it's as if she's a fallen angel, threadbare wings finally faltering completely. She begins to weep; bitter, miserable, unforgiving sobs that she stifles with a furious and straining effort. "Let go."

"No." I don't understand; I can't even begin to grasp why she now speaks in a manner that would horrify even Vasilevich, with a coarse and vicious savageness. "No. Not- not until you tell me what's-"

"_Sometin' dee matta_?" It's a familiar intonation, gruff and severe; Xi Go turns in the distant reaches of my sight, confronting our interlocutor with a palpable aggravation.

"Is anything the matter?" She speaks _Wu_; so convulsed am I by this manic disorientation that I cannot even muster the slightest shred of delight at that easy and effortless understanding.

"What're you doin' with one'a the girls, woman?" He's no better spoken in Chinese than he is English, I realize; he's no more polite, either, a raging welter of aggravation threatening to spring forth and consume him at his harsh bearing toward my lover.

"Excuse me?" Xi Go seems a bit perplexed, an uneasiness and incomprehension abundantly manifest in her beauteous tones and our link. "What do you mean?"

"Did I see that girl slappin' 'round one'a the madame's girls? You cain't do that out here, no matter who y'is."

"Pardon?" A growing ominousness that the hooligan overtly fails to perceive has begun to embrace each word with a molten sheath of steel.

"Chieftain Du'll forgive ya fer it, but ya cain't do it out here. You wanna get a private room with'er?" I don't quite understand; the whole of that laconic, alien cruelty simply seems to drift incomprehensibly through my senses, even as I feel my chest tighten with some fundamental understanding of its evil. Ariadne has begun to quiver with a hot and tortured misery; her eyes fall from my own, a ghastly vermillion staining features slack with a sudden anguish. Ariadne's shoulders have stooped; she stands as if a stricken animal, or a slave, bowed in a witless supplication.

"Kimberly..." Xi Go's voice shudders perilously in inquiry.

"Yes, we will." I finally answer; I barely even realize that I've spoken until the woman that I had once believed would be the center of my eternity fixes me with eyes awash in betrayal, crimson lips flaring horrifically against a desolate pallor.

"Kimberly?" Even Xi Go seems baffled.

"Yes, we will. I'd... We would like to have time alone with her."

"Go on upstairs, then." I finally turn, confronting the waiter; his dark features are contorted into a pernicious, unctuous sneer, his beady eyes glistening as he beholds Ariadne before us. "Don't getta lotta girls 'ere; maybe it'll be a break fer her." A nausea virtually indescribable overtakes me at the hideous laugh that spills from his repugnant, toothless grin; it's an agonizing struggle to restrain the angry welter of violence that suddenly twitches through every reach of my body. My arms strain with an inarticulate fury; images of death, of destruction, of horrific, unnatural contortions of mangled humanity well forth without relent. My power screams, pleads with wailing desperation, to be released; I merely offer him Xi Go's supremely disingenuous, hollow smile, even as I revolt at the sickly and diseased aura that pools around him, its taint yielding a shivering crawl of my suddenly chilled flesh.

"Very well." Ariadne has bowed again with an insufferable resignation, not offering the minutest resistance as she's drawn toward the expansive, sweeping staircase of elegantly hewn mahogany that curls with a languid grace from the balcony toward the floor. It's not obfuscated behind lurid scarlet curtains; no crimson lanterns blaze beside it. I realize that finely-adorned men and women alike traipse along its lustrous steps, similar beauties in tow; it's a terrible and vulgar epiphany, and yet I have committed myself to this, however repellent a pretension it may be.

"Kimberly, what are you doing?" Xi Go finally speaks, elegant and beauteous Chinese words alight with a palpable anxiety; it glimmers with a harsh sheen of some uncertain dread, as if she does not quite understand what I intend.

"Please, trust me, _Shego_." I implore. My horror at the pernicious splendor of The Red Dragon mounts with every shuffling step along the staircase; men and women alike are without shame to traipse along this wooden perdition, as if gleefully tumbling into hell's embrace with an illusory rise to a brief and sinful paradise. The vermillion banners now seem tributes to some abhorrent devil; the grandiose trappings of this decadent hall assuredly the temptations of the truly demonic. The upper floor is even more unashamed, I realize, than the liquor-flooded hall; its denizens drape themselves in stupors of repellent and smug satiety upon the wooden railings, seeming to test the forgiveness of the divine as they hover above the glistening marble that lies beneath us.

Elegant paneling and intricate scrollwork of luminous dragons in full, glorious flight join curious emerald pillars of a sickly parody of the luminous beacon of jade purity that gently rustles against my breast. I notice that not one patron averts their gaze from us; some favor us with stares alight with a salivating and inhuman lust, alighting at the image of beauty without any suggestion of humanity. Coarse words of sundry tongues bedevil us; other women, exaggerated, rictus smiles as if the leering grins of death masks, seek to entice without lust; they enjoin us our longing without desire of their own. A terrible and irrepressible nausea rises in a sickly haze throughout my mind and body alike; it stains my soul with a horrific and acid vulgarity, and I wish to retch, to pour forth the whole of these terrible thoughts, impressions, and sensations that I fear have begun to indelibly engrave themselves upon my mind.

I scream at myself why I must do this, why I should not merely flee without a further word; why my curiosity, why this lingering and tortured affection and fondness must impel me to subject Ariadne to further indignities. A door stands open before us, and I feel as if I should merely take flight, tears of unresolved tortures glistening eternally within these eyes, if need be.

"Are you certain about this?" Xi Go asks, a delicate and tentative murmur; the tender warmth of slender fingers has laced around my forearm, and I pivot to behold a beauteous and angelic visage wracked with a straining anxiety. Turning again, I discover what seems merely a pathetic and dismal shell of that flamboyant and beautiful apparition; dark eyes, hollow and expressionless, cast into the glinting perfection of well-varnished wood.

"Yes." A tortured instant that seems to endure for a silent eternity. "I'm sorry, _Shego_."

"Why?"

"Have you ever wished to ask Meilan, 'Why?'" A cringing recrimination swells into my breast at those horrendous and foolhardy words; they are unfair, and yet I cannot recall them.

"I understand." Perhaps she does; perhaps she does not. Nevertheless, the portal hammers closed behind us with a thunderous percussion that speaks of inescapable finality; the closure of a cave upon a desert father prepared for his final moments.

"I'm sorry." I do not know to whom those tortured words are whispered; they fill me with a sullen and tormented grief as intense as Ariadne's own. "I'm sorry."

"It's all right, Kimberly." I wish that we had departed; I realize, quite intensely, that I wish we had never visited this peculiar and awful place, this benighted realm of accursed and poisonous beauty; this land of unwholesome and diseased indulgences. "I understand."

The chamber that unfolds before us is not what I had expected; it is not the harvest of those nightmare images of decay and degradation that my forbidden perusal of Gorky had inspired. It is of a preposterous and vile stateliness, rife with European grandeur, as if drawn from a fine English manor home; soaring spires of a four-poster bed brandish the drooping satin vanity of pale ivory curtains in a warped and cruel parody of a demure bride's tenderest wedding night. A bedstand is rife with fine amenities; glimmering ampoules of liquor, crystalline tumblers, and water; heaps of refined handkerchiefs rustle upon a delicate breeze perfumed with the foul energy of Shanghai that has wholly soured before senses divested of any congenial delusion.

Without prompting, wrenching away with a pitiful strain from my now slackened hand, Ariadne settles upon the amply cushioned mattress; fine and lengthy, slim legs cross and uncross with worried anxiety, slender fingers straining upon downy sheets. Even as an irrepressible jumble of thoughts churns libidinously through my mind, not a single one seems suited for my lips, parched as if submerged in sand for eons; my throat quakes with an endless litany of questions, every one dying as it begins to well forth into the bestial reality that confronts me.

Finally, I manage a low, whispered, "Why?" A silent eternity unfolds, and I realize that she will not answer.

"Ariadne, why?" She does not stir upon her sullen and solitary perch. "Why? Please, Ariadne, tell me why. Why?" Every exhortation rises in urgency, in intensity, in utter and unendurable desperation; my voice has become a keening whimper, swelling to an almost shrill peak as I implore her again and again without success. Xi Go stands beside me, an unyieldingly devoted sentinel; the soothing warmth of her fingers interlaced with my own anchors me to this plane, restraining me in my increasing madness from simply relinquishing my grip upon this life entirely. If it were not for Xi Go, I realize, I would simply not be; if I had survived these interminable, agonizing days, this nightmare clash of the past and present, misshapen and tortured by the passage of time, I would cease to be in her stead.

"Ariadne, please. I- I need to know what has happened. Why are you here? Where is your family? Why did you not come to Paris with-"

"Shut up." A mild, whispering trickle of venom that seems to roar with the fury of a stricken tiger; it devours the words that linger upon my lips, shearing through this uneasy tranquility with a serrated cruelty. "Shut up, Kimberly. _Kim_." That wounds me perhaps more so than anything that could be said of me; invoking that despised diminutive with a conscious brutality that bruises more punishingly than a relentless rain of fists.

"Ariadne, I-"

"No. You wanted to hear what I have to say, didn't you?" Her voice has broken as she rages in German, shrill and hoarse with a manic and hysterical fury; every word flares with a blazing rage, unleashed at a relentless Maxim Gun cadence that shears through my very soul. "Perhaps your wife," Xi Go's most fervent efforts barely restrain a savage outpouring of this brittle and volatile power that palpitates through my breast as she wields that word as if a weapon, drenched with a poisonous contempt, "Should ask you why you're buying a whore for the evening. Or is she of your tastes, Kimberly?"

"I am not-"

"Don't dissemble, Lady Kimberly," a tortured and anguished parody of some awful, airy patrician chuckle. "Isn't that why you're paying for my company? Have you been wondering what a childhood friend tastes like?" I cannot believe the words that stream from her lips amid a haze of bitter and histrionic tears. "Have you been wondering how sweet it is, Kimberly? Do you want to take what you never could before? Do you want me to fuck you in front of your wife? Or is she really another one of your whores?" I reel at her madness, at that horrific and monstrous stream of obscenities that I barely even grasp; I do not understand this sudden outpouring of hatred, of directionless, eviscerating condemnation that hammers me like a cannonade.

"Won't you talk, Kimberly? Won't you hold me like you did; won't you kiss me, Kimberly? Is that what you always wanted? Or, do you want to be a happy family together, _Kim_?" I've begun to tremble uncontrollably, even in Xi Go's tender grasp; a furious welling of throbbing, raw, and angry emotions boils forth in terrible, writhing juxtaposition. A need to strike her, to silence her with an unremitting torrent of blows; to embrace her, to soothe her in this awful grief that floods the chamber with its livid enormity; to scream at her to understand; to return, for even the most ephemeral of moments, to the past with her, to quiet her as I had that terrible evening that found her wailing with unsuppressed anguish in my arms

"Well, _Kim_? Aren't you paying for this? Or, do you just want to watch me? Do you have that much money to waste on a filthy whore?" The serpentine caress of fine fingers, lengthy nails varnished a blazing scarlet that sears through my sight against the delicate and unblemished pallor of her skin, across her shoulders, taking hold of her gown in a ghoulish parody of a lover's caress, finally galvanizes me into action; I cannot endure a further instant of this.

I realize that I am no longer beside Xi Go as my arms fasten around her; an irresistible and intractable strength forces her against me, the tear-streaked warmth of her cheeks nestled against my breast as if a child's upon her mother's. I become aware of my own weeping only when the graceful lengths of Xi Go's slender fingers brush away the scalding torrents of anguished rivers across my cheeks, fastening me in her embrace as surely as I do Ariadne. Even as I rage against the agony that I know this must be inflicting upon Xi Go, I surrender to her patience; I sob with Ariadne, feeling her chest heave with the relentless, wracking wails that torment her.

Those terrible, ugly words; those bestial and cruel epithets; those loathsome thoughts and fears seem to dissolve amid this peculiar and improbable union. I know, cradling her in my arms, that my terrors of the past, of some terrible and enduring infidelity, are as trivial as sparrow's tears; I do love Ariadne, but not as I do Xi Go; I could not. It is not a love that rages with an infernal, roaring intensity, that consumes me utterly with a flaring and bewildering haze of rapture so complete that a single instant in its absence would destroy me; would encase me in an unyielding and impenetrable sheath of ice that would leave nothing but an arctic, soulless emptiness in its wake.

Ariadne, I realize, bears the love of a child; of a glorious and transcendental friendship, even bruised and mangled so horrendously by this ordeal. I do not desire to kiss her; even consumed with this intimacy, there is no sense of that heart-throbbing, pleading desire that riots through every reach of my being in Xi Go's presence.

"Kimberly, I... I..." That brittle, icy patina of hate has receded into distant memory; it seems to mingle with those peculiar, fragile vestiges of our past, another dreadful and tormented incarnation of that beautiful, budding girl that has blossomed into such a woeful and benighted flower. It is a peculiar duality of emotion, of thought; I barely recognize Ariadne, and yet it is as if we had been parted merely yesterday, that we are returning to the quiet, naïve shelter of Smolniy to resume our study of finery, etiquette, languages, and history; to huddle in a precious and eternal embrace against the leeching chill of our chambers.

"I am so sorry, Kimberly." A feeble, tearful whisper, rippling with a liquid grief, barely perceptible above my own quiet and strained sobs. "I am so sorry."

"For what?" I feign an innocent obliviousness, even as I do begin to sincerely wonder for what reason she should apologize. Amid this nightmare, her rage seems little more than the anguished whimper of a wounded animal; I cannot begrudge her that, regardless of how hurtful.

"For... For everything that I've said. Y-you must now truly hate me even more." That strangled sobbing continues to flood from between us, rising as if a scalding column of steam that wreathes me with a simmering agony. "You must hate me; you should hate me, Kimberly. I'm terrible; I'm disgusting." Her voice rises again to a miserable, hateful crescendo, every fiber of her being vibrating with a twanging loathing for herself. "Just go! I'm- I'm not worth anything; I don't even want you to see me like this.

"I can't bear it, Kimberly. You... You shouldn't remember me like this; not like this. Not like this. Please." That soaring, raw, rending misery plunges again to a whispering nadir of despair; I do not release her; I cannot abandon her; I can merely refuse her that selfish indulgence, cradling her in a shivering, wounded torment.

"Ariadne, I cannot; I will not." I finally affirm; it's a resounding vow, startling me with the enormity of conviction suddenly manifest in a frail pitch that continues to quaver with trepidation. "I will not abandon you. Not..." And it occurs to me as a sudden, savage epiphany; a tremendous, roaring and terrible realization that sends awful streams of woeful awareness sluicing through every reach of my soul. "Not again. I'm sorry." I do not know why I apologize; perhaps for being witness to this dreadful suffering that is her shame, that consumes her with this sorrow that flares in a pyre of self-immolation through her breast.

"You..." A deep and shuddering intake of breath that consumes both of us with a quaking tremor. "Why aren't you leaving?"

"I cannot, Ariadne. I... I do not know what has happened, but I can't bear the thought of being parted from you again."

"Does your wife feel the same?" No longer does she speak that as some preposterous and appalling affront to her very being. Her delicate and tremulous voice caresses it with the reverence that one would accord a distant and unreachable divinity; as a man adrift in the desert would the shimmering image of an oasis, praying for it not to be but a cruel, teasing mirage.

"Kimberly has told me of you, Ariadne; that is why I did not believe that you would behave so scornfully toward her." Even I flinch at the sternness of her words, though the quiet and contemplative murmur that follows it soothes that scalding blow. "But, I... I did not yet know of your plight, Ariadne; I'm so very sorry. I..." I can sense the taut and straining tension within my love; though the thoughts remain as murky as a turbid river with the fervent and furious struggle to suppress those distant, nightmare images, the crippling grief and shame and utter torment course in molten, searing torrents into my soul. "I can understand why you feel as you do."

"I- I somehow doubt that." A brief, desultory sniffle. "I very, very much doubt that."

"I cannot force you to believe me." An offering of gentle empathy; a mild, weary smile barely creases my lips as one of Xi Go's hands, slim fingers lacing around my own, joins mine upon the small of Ariadne's back.

"Why are you here, Ariadne?" However terrible it is to ask anything of her amidst this waking misery, I cannot restrain this furious and unflinching need for closure that overtakes me; it has gnawed at me for four years, pleading and screaming to a silent god for an answer of what had become of the friend that endowed my life with meaning. Now, I wish to wrest an understanding of what has become of her from that ethereal ineffability; why Ariadne, why anyone, should be forced to endure such suffering.

"Kimberly, I... Why does that matter now? I'm not worthy of your friendship, of your love; I'm not deserving of anything. You- you should just abandon me here; both you and your wife should pretend that we had never met." She's begun to babble; a manic, shuddering cadence of low, mournful whimpers that again raise stout and scalding beads of liquid agony before my sight. "I am cursed, Kimberly; I'm an accursed, useless wretch, and I've brought nothing but-"

"Be silent, Ariadne. Please." I cannot bear to endure this a moment further; my soul wails in terrible and insufferable syncopation with her grief. This love that pervades me truly is that for a sister; a bond of extraordinary power that eclipses mere fondness or familiarity; I do love her with a passion that throbs with a fierce and fiery intensity, consuming me with a yearning to comfort her, to soothe her in this thrall of unrelenting misery. "Please, do not say such terrible things. I want to know why you are here."

"Why?" A gurgling whimper, barely audible as it struggles from between lips that I feel trembling against my stomach. "Why do you even care?"

"Because I love you, Ariadne." I have never spoken those words with her; never before have I quite understood the jumbled, hot, and bewildering constellation of emotions that writhe in irrepressible tandem with them. No longer is it that relentless, blazing, anxious pressure within my chest, raking along every nerve with an urgent and almost mindless, inarticulate craving for her touch, to close a distance that I now understand would and could never be.

"K-Kimberly, you cannot possibly mean-"

"I do." I affirm, silencing any protest; lifting my gaze with a trepiditious unease toward Xi Go, a glorious chill soothes this searing uncertainty that continues to boil within my breast at the gnawing fear that she may not understand, despite this divine thread that unites us. The tenderest of smiles has claimed the full, rouged loveliness of her lips; an undeniable and wondrously heartening joy glimmering in a gaze of candid love and devotion. She does understand; I, at long last, do with equal intensity and conviction.

This endless, convulsive terror, this fear of being untrue, of ever having been untrue, to my love has receded into a distant and forgotten penumbra, not even the subtlest glint penetrating that all-enveloping shadow.

"I do love you, Ariadne." I repeat, voice swelling with a singular and glorious confidence.

"Not... Not as I love you." I start at that. "As I have always loved you, Kimberly." Those words seep from between clenched teeth as if some unutterable sin, an unforgivable incantation of wicked power that should never be granted life; a fervent, straining pressure upon my abdomen finally forces me away from her, and I confront Ariadne's lovely visage again, streaked with tears that have begun to geyser forth in massive, torrential floods. Soft alabaster cheeks glitter with molten sorrow; her deep auburn locks are disheveled, matted against her features with a damp misery.

"P-please, allow me to tell you this. Just- just once, even... Even though I know that you will never feel about me as I do you."

"Ariadne-"

"Please!" A brief and garbled wail recedes into a low and mournful whimper. "Please, Kimberly. I... I love you; I love you so much. I've loved you since the moment that we met at Smolniy; since the second that you were introduced to me, that you entrusted yourself to me. Even- even then, I knew that it wasn't the love that sisters or friends should feel; I knew that it was terrible, that it was sinful, that you would never, ever forgive me for something so awful.

"I... I know that it is a sin, but I feel so foolish, seeing you this way with... With your wife." A brief, tortured instant of pensive silence. "Your wife." Despite a desperate struggle to preserve a gentle neutrality, I can feel an angry welter of resentment and regret flare into her quaking tone. "Your wife. She- she is so beautiful; you are so beautiful. More... More than I could ever possibly have believed.

"I know that it is terribly selfish of me... It's terribly selfish to tell you this, Kimberly; especially now. I'm sure that you hate me; and I'm sure that your wife hates me all the more for this dreadful confession. You probably didn't even notice, but there were so many times, when I held you in my arms, that I wanted more; that I burned to take hold of you with a lover's passion, to close that tiny distance that would always linger between us and kiss you.

"And... And I cannot now. Throughout these four years, I've preserved myself with fantasies about being with you; visualizing myself always with you, in your arms, sheltered by your warmth in Smolniy, in Saint Petersburg, away from all of this. I have kept those thoughts alive because I always prayed, again and again, to god, no matter how sinful and wretched those prayers were, for us to be reunited; and I have found that... That it is meaningless, Kimberly.

"I am ruined; I'm nothing but a broken and useless thing, and you are so beautiful. You- you can even find the happiness of marriage with your wife in this land, and I could never even conjure the courage to tell you how deeply I cared for you. I wasted so much time, so many opportunities, because of that fear, and now my life is nothing but that. I know that it is horrible to say this, for someone like me... For- for anyone to rue this, to mourn this, in the presence of... Of..." Deep russet, misted with an almost impenetrable, gleaming haze of tears, flits to Xi Go; there is an unutterable anguish swimming within that blazing ocean, a grief and sorrow and regret and guilt that I feel resound even into my bride's soul. Ariadne cannot bear to speak that word; to acknowledge again, with such terrible and utter finality, the death of those dreams that have sustained her.

I have pondered often if I would feel any twinge of regret of my own if I were to hear this; if I would feel that my life could ever have been so complete as it is now with Xi Go in Ariadne's arms, or if it would merely be a terrible imposter; a pathetic and feeble imitation of that fulfillment and all-enveloping adoration. And I understand that it would not be; my thoughts, however cruel, do not drift to a whimsical and wistful sense of what could have been; I can think only of my eternity with Xi Go, and I know that I cannot speak those words to this tortured and woeful being before me.

"D-do not feel obligated to say anything. I... I know that you never felt for me as I did you." Perhaps I did; my security, my certainty, in the transcendental beauty of my love with Xi Go emboldens me to ponder that.

"I do love you, Ariadne." I finally conclude.

"That... That is not how I wished to hear that, Kimberly." And, as if the rupturing of a dam, Ariadne's tears pour forth in unimaginable profusion; she collapses with a cringing, shuddering explosion of irrepressible sorrow, swelling forth in wrenching waves of torment, writhing with a tangible and sanguine awfulness. "I'm sorry, but that's not how I'd wish to hear you... To hear you tell me that; not with the woman that you truly love; not with your future beside your distant past."

"I am sorry, Ariadne." My own whisper trembles with an unsuppressed grief. "I'm so sorry."

"D-don't apologize, Kimberly; don't insult me with an apology. You- you deserve to be happy; you didn't even... Didn't even know that I was alive. You didn't know what had become of me." Those awful, convulsive, wracking wails continue to swell to a hellish crescendo. Even clenching closed my eyes with the bitterest and most fervent effort, those terrible, angrily rippling tendrils of her suffering continue to lash through my soul as bestial, snapping apparitions of vermillion.

"I'm sorry." Again, I can but apologize. "I... I feel as if I'd abandoned you, Ariadne."

"You have not. I... I don't hate you; I could never hate you. I'm sorry, Kimberly; I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." Repeated as a dreadful and tortured mantra. "Seeing- seeing you, after so much time, I was afraid- so afraid. I... I felt like all of that love, at once, had been betrayed to glimpse you in- in a beautiful dress, without a single care, barely even recognizing me.

"In that second, I was terrified that you'd forgotten me, Kimberly; that I meant so little to you that life just continued without another thought. That- that you'd just become careless and frivolous, living here without a single worry; that every second that I had preserved our love was for nothing. I- I just became so angry, and... And I wanted to take you with me; to claim you; to make you sweep me away from all of this."

"I will." That is not a vow that lunges without thought or contemplation to my lips as some impetuous impulse; it is not a solemn promise spoken without concern for its repercussions. It is an iron, unyielding certainty that I must liberate my friend, my sister, a woman that I truly, deeply love from this waking nightmare. Even if I cannot deliver her from the wailing sorrow that convulses her, that will consume her as surely as... As such unspeakable loss had Xi Go with every unimaginable parting; even if I cannot free her from the grip of such misery, I will release these shackles of inhumanity. The mystic strength that suffuses me with a throbbing, palpitating fury grants me that certainty.

"That's ridiculous, Kimberly." Another dismal and pathetic snuffle, even as a sudden, twanging strain consumes her, as if a cord drawn taut. "Don't- don't say that. I can't bear to hear anything so cruel, even if... Even if you're trying to cheer me."

"I'm quite sincere, Ariadne." And I truly am. The conviction to free her from this dismal plight is all-consuming and without reservation. "Truly."

"How, Kimberly? How? D-do you even have the slightest inkling of what is happening here?" However intensely it should aggravate me, I don't begrudge her this condescending sense of my utter unworldliness and ignorance.

"I have, Ariadne; I have." Partially, in any event. Perhaps the words and abstract ideas elude my dazed and directionlessly groping mind, but the certain and terrible, wrenching sense of some dreadful evil is impossibly manifest; she weeps and sobs in the shackles of some indescribably vile bondage, and I will not abide it a moment further.

"Do you? I... I do not wish to call you simple, but-" I cannot bear the awful warring of some desperate, pleading hope and a crushing resignation of being beyond salvation within her quivering voice.

"I know that I am unworldly, Ariadne; I know this more intensely than anyone." I cringe at that notion, that sense of being eternally swaddled within the sheltering folds of some vacuous and uninterrupted childhood, isolated from the cruel and crushing reality of humanity. "Nevertheless, I know that this is wrong; that you do not belong here. Please, believe me, Ariadne." A beat as I offer a fervent, pleading gaze to Xi Go, eyes alight with a pining for her to intervene, to resolve the whole of this with some mystic incantation, some invocation of the ineffable and omnipotent. "Please."

"Kimberly is right." I know that it is a wrenching struggle for Xi Go; I know that, for her unfaltering certainty in our love, of my unyielding commitment, this is nevertheless a confrontation with the nightmarish; I know that, perhaps, I would not be so patient with Meilan. Nevertheless, with a true immortal's strength, she speaks with a fervent, iron conviction; her tone does not waver, and her dark, soulful stare does not once flicker from its purchase upon us.

"W-what? What are you talking about?"

"My name is _Shego_, Ariadne; please, call me that." Again, with a humanity that I could never demand of her amid this turmoil, Xi Go commands this with an aching, conciliatory tenderness.

"Why should you have any cause to help me, Miss _Shego_?"

"You cared for Kimberly; you love her, I think, as I do. I... I owe you a great deal more than I could possibly aspire to explain to you for caring for her, for sheltering her in her youth, when we did not yet know of one another. I cannot blame you for your love any more so than you can me." My love's words do not waver, and I understand with a renewed, blazing flame of passion why I adore her; why my reverence, my love, my unfailing commitment to her is as if divine worship.

"I..." Ariadne's eyes glimmer with a solemn and cruel mist, her fine features straining with a quaking tension as some terrible inner battle rages; benevolence, hatred, inhumanity, love, devotion, betrayal, rage, and tenderness... Those seem to flare in equal measure, mingling and intertwining, parting and clashing, within her anguished gaze; she finally speaks. "I do not think that I could say that to you, Miss _Shego_; I'm sorry. I... I know that I would not be so kind if I found myself in your place."

"I think that you would; I am because of this love. I know that this is torture for you, Ariadne, but I would like to help you; no one deserves this. This is... This is unforgivable." A low and pensive murmur, rising with a swelling conviction; my own heart soars with an extraordinary pride, a singular and overpowering delight, that Xi Go is my love, that she is my very life.

"I... Do you truly mean this? That you will protect me? What would you do?" She seems barely to even accept the notion, even as she grasps at the very prospect with a desperate ferocity.

"Why are you here, Ariadne?" Xi Go has settled beside her; I remain standing, her gaze drifting uneasily between us, as if surrounded by a pair of fearsome and terrible predators.

"W-what do you mean?"

"Why are you in Shanghai?" Xi Go seems to command an answer, even as Ariadne's gentle and tortured eyes flare with a liquid anguish at such a thought.

"W-why? I..."

"It's all right, Ariadne." My words barely seem to soothe her, as if the feeblest of mist struggling to extinguish a bonfire. "You- you don't need to tell us."

"I should tell you, Kimberly; I should. I... I want to tell you; I haven't even spoken to anyone since... Since..." Any further words dissolve into a gurgling agony; it seems as if she's been robbed of every trace of strength, buckling upon herself as though a shattered hulk, quiet, whimpering sobs erupting from the very depths of her soul. "Since I was brought here."

"There's no need, Ariadne; truly."

"You haven't even seen me for four years, and yet you act as if I'm still your friend from Smolniy, even as I've acted so horribly toward you." She whimpers, deep, wrenching gasps lurching into every word. "Why are you so kind to me?"

"Because, Ariadne... Because you are my friend; because a day has not passed when I haven't thought of you. I had never forgotten you; I missed you more terribly than I could believe those four years. I always feared for you, for what might have become of you and your family; I waited every hour of every day in Paris with a hope that you'd arrive, that everything would become normal again. I wept with our parting; I felt as if I'd lost some essential part of myself." Even if that Kimberly Dmitriovna has been consigned to the silent oblivion of some distant tomb, those emotions continue throb with a fierce and urgent intensity, as if merely a day has passed since our parting.

"I love _Shego_... I know that it is difficult for you to hear, but I love her more deeply than I could ever hope to describe; I am her wife; we will truly be married when I, at last, can be away from my own family. But, I love you, as well; it's a different sort of love, but love nevertheless, and it would torture me until the..." A harsh and severe, hitching intake of breath. "Until the end of time, Ariadne, if I were to leave you here. I... I do not even wish to know what-"

"I am a whore, Kimberly." An awful and wrenching, muted scream; the words linger as if some nightmare, malign mist. "I am a whore. You... You paid for me this evening, Kimberly, because- because that horrible beast owns me. I... I am ruined, destroyed; there is nothing left of me that you knew-"

"That's nonsense."

"I have been hurt so often that I cannot even feel the pain, Kimberly; I can't feel anything. I just look at that dreadful ceiling and think of you; I always hope that you will come for me, that you will be the one to hold me, to take me away from this. I could not even cry."

"How did this happen, Ariadne? How?" Her family was wealthier than my own; the regal enormity of their affluence was such that dukes and royalty craved her hand in marriage. She dwelt in finery so exquisite that our own manor was as if a hovel; her clothing rendered my own paltry rags.

"We did not leave, Kimberly; not when your family did. My... My parents would not dream of abandoning their factories, their properties, even when everything began to fall apart. There was so much violence; even if I did not see it, or even know of it, at first, it became terrible. There was daily fighting; rioting and bloodshed. I remember learning to know which ones were the Maxim Guns from our servants, and which were rifles; which were pistols; which were bombs; which ones could reach into our home, even through the walls." Unaccountably, horrifically, Ariadne's speech has become utterly bereft of the subtlest suggestion of expression, a level and sullen monotone; neither fear, nor torment, nor anguish, nor excitement, nor any suggestion of humanity seep through that impassive mask of complete and singular apathy that seems to consume her very soul. Terribly, even her eyes have become glazed with an icy cast, as if receding into the depths of some unspeakable past as she recounts this; as if devoured by a waking nightmare that has engulfed her spirit without relent.

"I... I don't understand, Ariadne."

"What don't you understand?" Still dazed, she nevertheless appears another woman entirely, snapped from that monstrous thrall.

"Why... Why your family did not depart; did my father not counsel yours to do so? My parents were not eager to leave, by any means, but we fled to France once the upheaval began; even with the peril of the war, it was still safer to escape to the west."

"Pride." That awful distance seems to dissolve into nothingness, a searing and acid bitterness leeching into the familiar, lovely strains of her voice. "Pride. Foolish, stupid, unreasoning pride; pride so strong that they would not leave, and would not compromise with the Provisional Government or the Bolsheviks or anyone else. My father would not pay the bribes at first; he would not act in his family's interest, because we were royalty.

"Royalty, Kimberly! As if that matters now. D-do you know what happened to royalty after the Revolution, Kimberly? They're dead; they were shot. 'Liquidated,'" an unaccountably mordant and cruel amusement swells for a moment, "As the Leninists said. And there's another war now, too."

"I know." A low and dismal sigh. "I know. I... I read the newspaper; I have until coming here, anyway. I- I always sought out your family's name; I wondered what had happened to you." With a harsh swallow of what feels a stream of ragged spines, I conjure the will to continue. "But, what had happened to your family? Why are you in Shanghai?"

"The war, Kimberly. The- the civil war, that is; the one that's tearing apart our country." It's been a seeming eternity since I have considered Russia 'my' country, and yet I nevertheless afford her a nod of acknowledgment. "It's a nightmare. Do... Do you have any idea what's happening there? People are starving; they're dying by the thousands and thousands every day; they're killing each other for kindling. For kindling! It's... It's impossible; everyone is a killer; everyone is a murderer.

"There is no one good left in our land, Kimberly. No one cares what happens to their neighbor, so long as they can steal their livelihood to survive. I... I know," a deep and tremulous, tortured intake of breath, "I know that people like our," I cringe at the accusation, but I cannot reject it, "Families are at fault; I know that it is the wealth and privilege that we took for granted. It was even having enough to eat while the people starved; and we did not even know it. Did... Did you know that there were poor people before the revolution began? Did you even know that's what the bible had meant?"

"No." I cannot but answer sincerely; I feel a fool, but that is nonetheless true. I could not even begin to envision then what poverty was; what even being of modest means had been. Guilt convulses me when I realize that I cannot struggle to imagine Xi Go's misery as a child.

"Do not blame yourself for your family's lot, Ariadne." Xi Go finally speaks again; a welter of astonishment floods through me at the tenderest of caresses of those fine, slender fingers across Ariadne's bare shoulder. "I was raised with unbelievable poverty, and I do not blame my family for that." It is obvious that she refuses to blame them for that alone as an irrepressible flare of hate flickers through her dark gaze. "I do not blame myself. I do not blame Kimberly for being wealthy."

"We were fools; stupid, stupid fools, Miss _Shego_. We may not be to blame for inheriting great wealth, but we were for enlarging it with the blood and sweat of men and women treated like slaves. We were at fault for hurting so many for a few more luxuries that we didn't even notice. I... I'm beginning to think that this torture is divine retribution for our sins."

"That's moronic." Xi Go's stern snarl rends through the agonizing silence as if a blade of jagged steel. "That is one of the stupidest things that I have ever heard. I, too, believed that the pain that I suffered once was punishment for some past wrongs, but that is nonsense. There... There is no justice that would hurt anyone so cruelly; there is no god that would be so bestial as to..." Without restraint, Xi Go claims Ariadne's hand, fastening it between her own with an almost crushing ferocity. "To take away something so precious from you, Ariadne."

"You understand, don't you?" A whisper of near-awe seeps from between her lips as auburn pools finally embrace deep and brooding sloe. "You... You've suffered like this, haven't you?"

"My parents sold me, as well, Ariadne; when I was only a young girl. I... I did not even know it until it was much, much too late."

"A-Ariadne, you..." I cannot even complete that thought, my words trickling into a sullen nothingness. I, foolishly, did not even ponder anything so unfathomably dreadful; it seems impossible that anyone, ever, could be of such bestial and loathsome cruelty.

"Yes." A hot, tortured whisper, rising to a mournful, keening cry. "Yes, Kimberly."

"How did this happen, Ariadne?"

"We fled from the war; it was much too late, but we still fled to the east. It... It was terrible, Kimberly." A shivering, unsteady whimper. "Just... Just, just so very, unutterably terrible. We left with so little. They- they came to our house one evening; most of our servants had abandoned us, and yet some had remained. They had started taking so much in bribes, but my father continued everyday to tell us that everything would be fine; that the _Tsar_ would return, and that all would be well. The soldiers," she snarls, a sudden flaring of an unfamiliar hate untempered by anything so gentle as humanity, "They were brutes; they threatened us; they insulted us; they said terrible, unrepeatable things.

"Still, my father would not leave until that evening. The Red Guard- they called themselves that, but were only a gang of thugs- stormed through our gate; they shot two of our servants. They- they were drunk, but that had orders to seek out 'enemies of the people'. They... They beat my father. They- they did terrible things to us, Kimberly." She does not sob, even as awful, cruel tears bead upon quivering and sorrowful pools; her voice dips to an agonizing whisper. "They made my father and brothers watch when... When they..." I cannot bear it; I barely understand what words she speaks, but I cannot endure them a moment further, folding her into my arms as Xi Go continues to cling to her quaking hands. "It hurt so terribly, Kimberly; it was so painful. And- and they laughed at us; they laughed at me when I cried, when I wept, when I begged them to stop.

"They didn't. It... It was only when they were tired that they left. My mother told him that she would hang herself if they did not go, so we left, but it did not matter. Our servants had abandoned us with fear or this revolutionary hatred; my brothers were too young to fight, or too scared; Nikolai and Ilya had died at the front. We had gold, and money, and jewels; we would not leave anything else for those scavengers, so we burnt our manor to the ground. We shot the horses, or loosed them; we destroyed everything. I could do nothing but cry, Kimberly; I just watched all of this, everything that was my life, vanish. I... I couldn't even take mementos of you; it was all things that my father thought valuable.

"He said that we would escape to the east, to Vladivostok; he said that we should go there, to be where... Where he thought the Empire still lived. It was a nightmare; the trains were barely in existence. Even then, they were unheated, and they could be appropriated by these terrible bandits that called themselves Tsarists; they were just criminals. No one cared about royalty anymore; no one even knew who we were. We- we were just the enemy, if we were anyone; and I learned what it was to go hungry. I learned what eating horseflesh was, what it was to pick over spoiled grain that the farmers were selling from their planting stocks.

"It... It was unbearable, Kimberly; not the terrible food, not the cold, not the illness. It- it was listening to my parents bicker, every day of every hour. They didn't care about us any longer; they thought of nothing but resuming a life of luxury, of indulgence. He started beating her; almost every day, every hour; whenever he was upset, or found vodka, he would start to hit her until she could no longer scream and cry.

"He would beat us; he would hit my brothers, and kick them and punch them if they cried out. And..."

"Ariadne, you don't need to say any more." Perhaps Xi Go is as consumed with this horror as I am; this constant, waking agony that streams forth with a dreadful and wrenching monotone, whimpering torment periodically welling in fountaining anguish through those icy waters.

"I do. I can't bear to just hear my thoughts again and again in silence. I- I know that it's selfish to burden you with this, but-"

"It's not selfish, Ariadne." As I speak, I discover that I'm weeping more woefully than Ariadne; scalding, insufferable streaks of tears blaze along my cheeks in tortured currents; my words convulse with a quivering misery. "It's not."

"He would touch me, Kimberly; touch me as no father ever should his daughter. I... It became so that I wouldn't even scream, or protest, or do anything; he would hit me if I struggled, and my mother and brothers would do nothing. He... He forced himself upon me, and I could do nothing. He would call me a whore, and a useless, terrible daughter; he would laugh just like the soldiers, and I could not even cry any longer. I... I could do nothing.

"I did not want to live, Kimberly. When... When I no longer bled when I should, I- I thought that I should just end my life." She confesses this with a monstrous normality, even as her eyes scream with an anguish more torturous than her voice could ever capture. "Even when we arrived in Vladivostok, he would not stop; even when we found a home, when everything seemed almost ordinary, he would not end this cruelty. My- my mother knew that I was with child; she despised me, Kimberly. She treated me as a whore for what had been done to me, no matter how I pleaded and begged for her to show me even the slightest kernel of kindness.

"I thought of just throwing myself into the bay, or drowning myself in the bath; I even cut into my arm one day with my father's straight razor, but I could not continue. I... I realized that I had not forgotten you; I had not forgotten how deeply I loved you, how I craved to live my life with you." Again, Ariadne, my friend... The source of this peculiar and enduring love... Again, she collapses into awful, wracking wails, as if this is the greatest torment of the ordeals she has suffered; that the bestiality, the animal evil and cruelty that had been inflicted upon her mean nothing against this sudden desolation.

"You- I am sure that you never knew, Kimberly, but I would always fantasize about holding you nearer, about kissing you. I... I would... I would imagine us together, as if I were touching myself again when we were so young, just thinking about you... I would imagine that when my father, when he..." A horrid, cringing whimper. "When he would treat me like a whore; I would imagine that I could hear only your voice; I could still remember it.

"But, we... We could not remain in Vladivostok; the Bolsheviks were winning more and more, and my mother forced him to take us away. He still beat her, and yet she had started to focus his hatred upon me, as if I were some dreadful enemy to be despised. She forced him to bring us to Shanghai last year, to the French Concession; there are many Russians here, you know?" A musing of chillingly sudden normality, as if she has, for a flickering instant, taken leave of her senses, of this awful grief. "Most of them are even worse off. Most of them are the petty bourgeois that my parents hated, and they have nothing. I've... I've even met a few of them here; they're miserable, just like I am.

"I- I think that it was the opium that made everything even worse; I didn't even believe it was possible until those mad fits began. I... I was actually relieved," a dismal and bitter laugh that grates as if ragged stone upon my very soul, "That he was gone constantly; that he would no longer scream at me, insult me, that... That he'd no longer call me a whore at every second; that he would admonish me for being fat, even though I was heavy with child.

"But, I... I think almost of those nightmare moments as a relief when he came home from those hours or days away from us; gaunt, white, he would scream and cry and weep and vomit. He would brutalize my mother, and she would say nothing. And he... He would hurt me so badly, Kimberly." Her gaze falls from mine for a brief, torturous instant, as if pondering whether she can even continue; her jaw trembles; her hand blazes upon my back, nails piercing into my skin with a knifing ferocity.

"He beat me so terribly that I lost the child. I- I cannot believe how that devastated me. I dreaded the day as it approached, and yet... Seeing- seeing that small thing tumble from me, with so much pain, with so much blood, I thought that it was unfair. It was something growing inside of me, Kimberly; it had taken the harvest of so much hatred, and so much cruelty, and so much evil, and it had become something that was so beautiful that I finally cried for the first time in ages.

"I held it like a madwoman in the bath, sobbing and sobbing until I could no longer shed any tears. It was red, and small, and shriveled, but... But, it was actually alive. For... For the briefest of moments, it held my finger, and..." Her arm fastened around me seems nearly to shear through my body; I weep with her, not perceiving anything but that unutterable agony that boils forth as if suppressed beneath this terrible arctic shell for eons. "And it died. It died, Kimberly, while I held it; while I could do nothing but... But sing an old nursery rhyme to it. I think that I did lose my mind then. Everything- everything else is just a jumble until I saw you again.

"I've lived every day without feeling anything, without even knowing anything but that I must eat or they will beat me to death; that I must submit to these... To these evil men and their desires, or they will kill me without a second thought; they will... They will make me suffer unto death; they will tear apart my soul. And, while I would not care for myself, I have feared never again meeting you, even if you would reject me as a vile and revolting whore.

"My father sold me to this man for more opium; for a chest of it. He- he just told me that I was this devil's property, and that I would no longer be his daughter. That I was never his daughter; that I was only a burden, and he was glad to be rid of me. So, I have been forced to remain here; I am a slave, Kimberly. A slave... In- in a time when even we have no more serfs, I am a slave; forced to- to serve these dreadful men, to be some captive princess for them.

"I do not feel anything any longer; I am barren and dead. So, why do I long for escape? Why do I wish for you to sweep me away from this, even when I know that you will no longer love me? Why do I even bother, Kimberly? Why? Why?" An excruciating mantra that raises further, aching wails from me as I truly begin to sob in earnest.

I hold in my arms Ariadne; my enduring friend; a woman that I, in my girlish naïvete, believed would spend her life with me amid some patrician fantasy world of eternal childhood and comfort. I hold her as she weeps, as she shivers and howls and screams, at long last, the anguish that has festered and mounted within her soul as if some unimaginable malignancy. I hold a woman that I do love, even if it is not the adoration of a lover; not the devotion and craving desire of a wife. I feel my power rage and throb and blaze with an utter impotence; it is worthless to protect her now from the past. Everything that I have learned; the masteries of arcane techniques and alchemies that the love beside me has bestowed can achieve nothing in shredding away this pall of darkness.

Cringing tremors overtake me at that sudden and awful epiphany; that collision of the past and present in the form of Ariadne, confronting me with the awareness that I cannot simply cast away all that had been Kimberly Dmitriovna. While I may bear Bao Li's spirit, while Xi Go and I are destined eternally to be united in this glorious love... While our adoration is unshakable and absolute, I have nevertheless lived another life before this; it consumes me now, even as I sit with the awareness of another existence entirely. I do not know whether to surrender to the tears of Kimberly Dmitriovna, or to wield the savage fury of an immortal warrior; a crippling paralysis overtakes me as Ariadne and I share tears that we have not for years; Xi Go, too, weeps. Silent tears whisper across pale cheeks; her spirit screams through this bond with an anguish that resonates so horrifically with Ariadne's own.

"Kimberly, we will help Ariadne. We will do whatever we must." I do not start at Xi Go's affirmation; I can neither smile nor scowl. I merely remain convulsed with this unendurable sorrow.

"We will." Words, at long last, return to me as I echo her conviction. "We will."

"How will you, Kimberly? How? I... I could not ask you to spend a single-"

"We will free you, Ariadne. I promise you this. Money is no object; money is of no meaning, and no value."

"W-whatever do you mean?" Ariadne behaves as if Xi Go is mad, as though she has affronted some dreadful deity that dwells within those odious scraps of paper and gilded trinkets for which lives are so freely destroyed and exchanged.

"Money means nothing; it can be conjured as easily as a card from a magician's sleeve." And I, at once, understand the source of Xi Go's magical heap of pound notes.

"What are you talking about?" Ariadne still does not understand.

"_Shego_ is... She is a magician, Ariadne." I sniffle miserably, still entwined with her.

"A magician? You'll trick them?"

"It's not a trick; reality is not so rigid as many would think in this time. If... If you will indulge me, Ariadne." Obligingly, grudgingly, she parts from me; that swollen, damp warmth that has encircled us, tears dampening my gown and staining my skin with a molten agony, lifts, an insufferable chill rising in its stead. Both of us focus upon Xi Go as if a prestidigitator; but there are no elaborate and diverting movements; no poetic legerdemain; no trick. At once, a heap of gold materializes in her grasp; gleaming with a dark and almost malevolent luster beneath the lamps that blaze vermillion within this hellish chamber, they trickle as if water from King Midas' hands, rattling across the floor with a leaden percussion that fills me with a sense of unfathomable, raging resentment and hate.

Hatred for those that would destroy and ruin for these pitiful trinkets; hatred for those that would value these above the life of my friend; hatred for the fact that we could not liberate her from this misery sooner; hatred for the very existence of so filthy a creation as this. Hatred, I realize, nearly for everything but those that lie beside me within this realm of nightmares; their love steels me against this pernicious world; it blankets me, swaddles me, in a cushioned cloak sheathed in iron fury.

It feels cruel to confront Ariadne with this, to invoke this power with such easy grace, and yet I can perceive relief welling into her eyes in a measure equivalent to the suffering that permeates her very being so palpably.

"You must be a goddess, _Shego_." She marvels, her voice dipping to a reverential whisper. Perhaps Ariadne does not understand how near she is to the truth.

"Not quite." My love demures. "Not quite, Ariadne."

"W-who are you, Miss _Shego_?" Despite this torture, Ariadne's dignity, her regal refinement, has not vanished; it seems virtually a miraculous perseverance.

"Whatever do you mean, Ariadne?"

"D-do not dissemble. Please." Ariadne's delicate and fragile voice continues to quaver and tremble. "I... You have shown me something impossible; you did not use sleight of hand, or anything that a mere magician would."

"_Shego_ is an immortal." I feel a sudden shock of pure startlement writhe through our bond, though it lacks any sense of disapproval; a brief glance yields a pensive smile creasing her full lips, eyes darkened with tears. "She... I know that it must seem unbelievable, but she is truly an immortal; she is more powerful than anything in this world. She... She speaks with dragons and calls upon the gods at a whim." I had perhaps expected Ariadne to scoff, to react as perhaps anyone would to such an extraordinary claim; to behave as if I am a lunatic, or Xi Go a charlatan. There is nothing but silence.

"I... I do not understand." That patient, tentative whimper is perhaps the most startling of any. "I do not understand what you have told me, Kimberly."

"I... I know that it must sound terribly sacrilegious, but-"

"There is no god, Kimberly." Somehow, that tears through me as if a blazing lance; I feel a rigid tension shiver through me, a tortured heat seizing my stomach. Ariadne had been the most quietly pious girl whom I had ever met; she adored the thought of god, of salvation, of Christian charity. She was not of my mother's sensibilities; her devotion, however, was absolute. Even when I indifferently murmured through prayers, I could sense the faith flowing from her in palpable currents.

"W-what do you mean?"

"There is no god, Kimberly; it does not matter to me if what you say is sacrilegious. No god would ever allow his children to suffer as I have, as so many others have; no god would allow men to lord above other men as if deities themselves, elevated only by money and evil. No god would allow a child to be conceived with such cruelty, only to be taken away with equal cruelty; no god would allow a city, a place like this, to exist if he would wipe away Sodom and Gomorrah with a sweep of his fiery sword. No god would allow a war to happen." She has begun to sob again; a mad, unrelenting cadence of tortures, seemingly raised to the very ears of the divine in which neither of us can conjure faith.

"No god would allow children to be... To be so abused, to be tortured; to see them starve until their stomachs burst as fat men gorge themselves. I will not believe that any god would be so cruel, would be so thoughtless and indifferent. I no longer pray, Kimberly; I have not uttered a sincere prayer to god since the day that I arrived here and saw that my suffering was matched by so many others. That what I have endured is almost luxuriant against what so many others have. No god has offered me salvation, Kimberly; only you and your wife have."

"Let us go, Kimberly." I realize that, even with the dissolution of my faith, Ariadne's seems impossibly tragic, as if she has cast away any hope and trust in the humanity that god, or fate, or _Tao_, or anything has borne into existence; that she cannot even believe in anything but that seething grief that ripples and flares through her. "Kimberly, we should take away Ariadne now. Please." Xi Go exhorts, and I obey with a silent nod.

"Thank you, _Shego_." Any further, tormented contemplation of that halts as she rises with a weary and tremulous sigh, as if her infinite reservoirs of strength have been depleted by this agony. "Thank you."

"She is your friend, Kimberly; she is someone deeply important. And, I understand why she is." Silently, with that peculiar bodily legerdemain, Xi Go materializes beside the door; perhaps only I can perceive the deft, gliding strokes of her body, a curious and impressionistic sense of motion as if a Monet conjured into living form. Not once do her feet enter into contact with the befouled wood.

"Ariadne, we will leave. I promise you this; nothing will discourage us. I would sooner," the words arise within my throat without thought, even as I reel at that unearthly and uncanny fury, "Crush everyone here, burn down everything, than see you endure this for a moment further."

"Kimberly?" She does not seem aghast; merely as bewildered as I am by such violent conviction.

"_Shego_ has trained me, Ariadne. I... I can fight; not even nearly so well as she, but I have learned to fight. I will protect you; we will protect you."

"You are certain?"

"Entirely." A vow without the slightest tremor, bereft of any doubt or uncertainty. "Come."

"All right." And we rise at once; words no longer seem possible as I guide her upon trembling legs toward the door. Even through this rising veil of steel, however, I feel a cringing and sickly trepidation throb; it grips my stomach with a torturous uneasiness as I begin to dread what will become of this. I will never permit Ariadne to return to this nightmare, and yet I fear desperately that they will not grant her leave, regardless of our persuasion.

"What are we to do, _Shego_?" I finally ask as we assemble before that innocuous, elegantly-hewn wooden portal that seems as ominous as a door into the netherworld.

"We will ask them permission to buy Ariadne. I know that this beastly Du is an indulgent wretch, a vile and greedy man who would part with his own wives for coin." And the door rattles open; at once, the blaring, bombastic strains of the band's music roils through this anxious haze. The thundering percussion and manic, squealing melody no longer ignite a visceral and writhing delight with my breast; no longer do I thrill at that forbidden splendor as if the blissful caress of the opium that has shattered Ariadne's life. It feels poisonous, tainted; the almost tangible depth and definition with which it throbbed seems utterly flattened, muted and reduced to nothing but the quailing screams of some vulgar beast of countless, babbling voices.

"To buy her?" A shiver of utter disgust flits through me at that notion, even pursued as subterfuge.

"I am his property, Kimberly, and-"

"You are no one's possession." I snarl, a liquid anger roiling through me; it fills me with a sudden swell of blistering fury, a caustic and malevolent steam that drives my limbs as if a locomotive. "You are no one's possession, Ariadne; no one is. This is not anything that I will hear from you ever again."

"Did you enjoy yourselves?" A disembodied voice ruptures my admonition, and I allow those furious strains to recede into silence; my sight flickers with an almost manic intensity about me until I realize that it has issued from behind us. Turning, my gaze falls upon an utterly dreadful spectacle; a woman, perhaps once a glorious beauty, now withered and shriveled with the accumulated evil that I sense streaming from her. Tentacles of some awful, gelid cruelty writhe and lash from the depths of a twisted and vile spirit; no density of pallid foundation can conceal this from my suddenly acute sight.

A full and voluptuous figure is clasped in a pernicious parody of the _zanze_ that I adore; vermillion dragons in full flight stream along its raven silk, and I wish to conjure them into existence to stamp away her very life in a cauldron of flame. I know that this wretched being, graying locks bound into a taut bun, is one of this Du devil's trusted cronies.

The pernicious smile, unctuous and alight with a deplorable relish at the notion of our having tortured Ariadne as so many others have, conjures a curious and terrible epiphany that I desire her death as I have nothing before in my life. Through our jade bond, a furious and stifling command rages; my limbs are at once leaden, clasped in an arresting embrace of unyielding strength that refuses to grant outlet to these bestial yearnings.

"Yes, we did. Ariadne is very lovely." Xi Go's voice is consumed again with that arctic neutrality that belies a shivering and terrible revulsion that throbs so fiercely within her breast.

"Her name means nothing." This abhorrent woman corrects with a vicious sneer. "Animals have no need for a name." It is a nightmare struggle not to claim Ariadne's hand in my grasp, to soothe her with a lingering and tender caress in a furious effort to nullify the liquid evil that floods from this vulgar demon's warped spirit. "How careless of me; I have not even introduced myself to valued customers. I am Madame Zhu; I am responsible for these girls."

"We would wish to speak with Chieftain Du, Madame." Xi Go's disgust soars to ever more noxious heights with every instant that we are in the presence of this walking abomination.

"Whatever for? Were you not satisfied with this slut? We have many more girls, perhaps more to your choosing. There are very exotic ones. Perhaps your young friend would have a greater fondness for an Arabian; perhaps an African." I desire only her head; my warrior's spirit lusts only for her blood with a hammering, urgent need that I believe would be Bao Li's pride.

"It is not that. Ariadne," Xi Go accentuates that with a savage defiance, "Is wonderful. We would like to buy her." The madame does not appear fazed in the slightest; she truly is the malign, wretched parasite that she appears to be, entertaining a request with the utmost, solemn thoughtfulness.

"To buy her? This worthless thing? She is nothing; why would you want her? The only thing she's good for is as a taxi dancer, or enticing men with an affection for broken royalty. I hear that Chieftain Du bought her from a Russian count. Are you entertaining regal fantasies of your own, Madame?"

"Do not kill her, Kimberly." That thought scalds through me, a reticent rebuke that nevertheless thunders across my very soul with a commanding fury.

"I have my own reasons, Madame. I am willing to pay handsomely for her."

"I can see that you and your young friend are very wealthy." A less than cagey murmur, offering me a sidelong, appraising glance that renders it so very difficult to obey Xi Go's demand. "Very well; I will take you to see Chieftain Du. Be polite with him. He will be the most powerful man in Shanghai, maybe in all of China, someday."

"I understand." And we are guided to that abhorrent staircase again; that blighted conduit of accursed wood to vulgar and wicked indulgences that only the most vile could consider pleasures. Ariadne is silent beside us, head bowed in a supplication that I feel with a disgust for the whole of this pernicious race of man; she remains a slight pace behind us, as if unable to even ponder an existence as an equal any longer. She is broken, and buckled, but I will not permit her to fall wholly into this spell of evil; I will not. I will giddily ignore Xi Go's order if I must.

The creature that confronts us is indeed the monstrous, azure-streaked beast that I had glimpsed from our table upon that great floor; encircled by his dreadful, hollow-eyed harem, silent and woeful in their submission in his presence, he appears some wicked king of the underworld. Yen Lo Wang would be ashamed to even torture this abomination, I realize; even the worst of torment would not suffice to wring even a single grain of filth from this blackened soul. The men that flank him, eying us with cold and empty stares consumed solely with an unforgivable hunger, are indeed Russians; they pervert that tongue with their lascivious and repellent murmurs; they are lower than the foulest of _Vory_ for their inhumanity.

"To what do I owe the pleasure of the most esteemed company of a woman of such high birth?" I am startled when he speaks; low, raspy, occasionally rising to a slightly reedy pitch, Du's voice is of an unfathomable noxiousness. Despite his almost exaggeratedly courtly and regal pretenses, he cannot conceal the fundamental fact that he is a monster cloaked in human flesh; he is a common and wretched criminal who has become consumed by a devil. The slender, gilded pipe that droops carelessly from shriveling fingers attests to this; putrid, cloying fumes boil in a sickly haze from it, the foulest of indulgences. I know that this must be what imprisons so many in its clutches.

"We would wish to purchase this girl." Xi Go speaks without the subtlest flicker of emotion; beneath that savage facade, I feel a rioting agony at the merest notion.

"Pardon me? I fear that, in my advancing age, I may be losing my hearing." Du is, however ragged and repulsive, not ancient; gaunt features are virtually unlined, and his hair is deepest raven.

"We would wish to purchase Ariadne. We would like to buy this slave."

"Why, if I may ask, would so distinguished a woman as yourself desire such a wretched and common bitch?"

"I have my own reasons." An impassive and cryptic retort. "I should think them beneath the interest of so powerful a man as Chieftain Du Yueshang."

"You know of me? I am most honored; but you have not introduced yourself." I sense a slightly harsh edge seep into his tone; Xi Go tenses at once, even as her body maintains its easy and effortless languor.

"My name is Go Xi." She does not lie; I am simply astounded to again confront such a seemingly surreal pronunciation of her exalted and beloved name.

"Select any girl that you would desire from amongst my whores, but not this one." He commands, with a sickeningly exaggerated geniality.

"Had you not said that she is of no worth? Why would you desire to retain a woman without value?"

"All women are without value." He spits this vile sentiment without reserve, his features at once contorted with a brutish savagery. "You are not to question my reasons. I would ask you to leave."

"I would wish to buy this girl, Chieftain Du. I will pay you in gold." Xi Go protests, a faint desperation welling into her sonorous voice.

"Begone." A command of singular pomp, as if he is an emperor.

"I will pay-"

"No."

"I will not hear 'no' from you, Chieftain Du; I do not understand this intransigence. I would like only to-"

"And I have told you to leave. Or, would you care to join this cunt?" The quiet groan of chairs signals the rise of his Russian bodyguards at such a dreadful signal, and I feel those iron bonds relax from my limbs, leaden restraints tumbling away as an unaccountable, blazing delight swells through my body. It is a raging fighting spirit; it boils through my limbs, fingers tensing into fists hardened to steel. "Perhaps I would like a taste of your young friend."

"That was a very poor decision, Yueshang." A bestial snarl contorts monstrous features at that insult, spoken with a truly palpable fury.

"Take them to the Madame's quarters; do with them as you will."

"Do not restrain yourself, Kimberly." My love orders, and I obey.


	14. Dragon

"Do not restrain yourself, Kimberly." That command thunders through my mind, a relentless, locomotive order that relentlessly and remorselessly tramples what lingers of any inhibitions; it's as if I've been intoxicated by this furious welter of straining, quivering bloodlust that overtakes me without preamble. It roars through me, a violent and raging dragon whose flames sear through every reach of my soul; pure, shuddering strength boils within me, a convulsive pressure that has risen throughout this ordeal to an insufferable pinnacle, clamoring for release through hands that have been sheathed in steel. Xi Go's demand looses that accumulated, shivering tension, warrior spirit flaring forth in rippling, molten strands of raw vermillion through sight suddenly grayed. Everything lunges into extraordinary definition amidst that monochrome focus; even the furious palpitation of blood screaming through my temples has become a sight unto itself, misting within the periphery of my awareness; auras spring into ferocious contrast, even as complex and ghastly humanity recedes into nebulous smears of ambiguous form.

No longer is any thought required of me; thought, I realize, is impossible. My waking mind seems to have risen to a higher plane, detached with a gauzy and dreamy lapse of awareness from an insipid corporeal form. Limbs thrash and strike as if manic serpents, so deft that any conscious guidance is of the utmost futility. It occurs to me, dazedly and almost laconically, that I finally have attained that singular focus that I have witnessed within Xi Go; unfurling as if some ethereal flower of liquid flame, it flares into full jade splendor, a majesty in emerald that swells and blazes with a savage and impossible fury that guides every blow to its target.

It is as if a waking incarnation of Zhuangzi's parable of the butcher; iron fists lash out and recoil, stroking with the easy and unconscious fluidity of the _Tao_'s instruction. My body, sinuous and rippling with a grace extraordinary, is alight with a quaking exhilaration that not once ruptures the serene and singular focus with which I unleash heaven's sanction upon the throng that has delivered such unfathomable ruination and anguish to Ariadne, to the one that I love as an eternal sister; to those that seem surrogates for the bestial and pernicious brutes that had inflicted such unimaginable cruelties upon the beloved for whom my very life endures, for whom this raging, livid spirit flames and roars within my breast. It hammers with the percussive enormity of my heartbeat, pounding and unremitting; this fury, this screaming and awful and glorious savagery that, at long last, uncoils following what seems an eternity of stifling restraint.

Dewy scarlet warmth, balmy and soothing as if the languorous caress of the first spring breeze through budding cypress, wreathes my hands; but those few streaks cannot quench an all-devouring flame. Blows rain as if a typhoon of divine punishment; we preside over a symphony of brutality, a serenade of cringing whimpers and pitiful, childish moans coaxed forth with expert focus. Paltry struggles at defense, sinewy and stout limbs raised in incredulous resistance, are as futile as a tree's silent protests before a saw; low, desultory crackles of failing bodies belie the seeming strength of our adversaries, and raise an almost manic and tortured agony at the ease with which they have enslaved and tormented.

Even Xi Go, I blearily realize, cannot rival the relish and intensity with which I approach this most sacred of endeavors; her own quicksilver grace, savage and rending strikes delivered with an effortless and liquid languor, has become virtually frozen as time itself dilates into limitless infinity. It feels as if I am the sole dancer in this celeritous ballet, infinitesimal, twinging motions sending me vaulting across vast distances, as though aided by some mystic hand of incomparable strength. I flow with a natural and intuitive grace, the languid cascade of a mountain stream along crags and culverts, guided by the spirit of almost frantically calm destruction that consumes me. It occurs to me suddenly that it is not even destruction; there is no malice, no ill intention, no conscious sense of devastation; it is the blazing fury of an erupting volcano, singular in its natural purity; the shearing immensity of tidal waves along the shore, obliterating all that lies in their path with a soul void of malevolence and compassion.

It is merely natural; _Wu-Wei_ in fulminating motion finally finds me atop one of my adversaries, the others still and bathed in a darkened veneer of that curious gray smear, a fist upraised with a tingling and electric vengeance; and, at that moment, that mystic focus lapses, a scalding and tortured lightning raking along every nerve with a bewildering fury, as if the cruel grasp of the divine has claimed my very soul within an unyielding, suffocating grip. At once, even as my arm, preparing to plunge as a piercing blade into my stricken foe's feeble flesh, quakes with a bestial craving, alight with a liquid brutality, a voice whispers into my fevered mind, suddenly plunging from those vertiginous pinnacles of enlightenment to a base nadir of tortured humanity.

Little more than the tenderest rustle of a serpent uncoiling amid rippling grasses, it nevertheless consumes me with an irresistible tension; a molten strain that grips my wrists as if leaden shackles, sapping every trace of that maniacal energy from them. A dying ember within the roiling penumbra of some dark and forbidden reach of my soul continues to flare and rage with a furious command that I continue, that I allow my fist to sunder this beast's spirit from his body, to deliver it unto the judgment of Yen Lo Wang and his boundless tortures; but that voice suffocates it as if a flood of crystalline beauty, stifling and smothering into submission the scalding flames of the dragon.

"Kimberly!" It gains depth and intensity, swelling into my resurgent senses with a curious and swimming distortion. "Kimberly! Kimberly!" Tinged with a faint, gauzy sense of the surreal, color and form have begun to return to my vision; what greets me is a study in crimson, a sanguine, bitter awfulness beginning to cool upon my fists, trickling in dense and gelid streams along my cheeks as if some abominable mascara. "Kimberly!"

"Yes." A sullen whisper of acknowledgment finally spills from my lips, coppery with what I know must be blood.

"You... You're all right." My love's voice has returned to its fullest and most beauteous definition, delicate and mellifluous, however agonizingly consumed by some torturous anxiety. "You're all right." The tenderest of warmth, a whisper of pliant heat, settles upon my shoulders; a convulsive, nauseated shiver flits through me as the sense of eyes opening fully reveals to me the awful wretch that lies beneath knees that continue to grind with unwitting brutality into yielding flesh.

Coarse features have been reduced to little more than a shattered husk, as if a city in the wake of an earthquake; pulverized topography in terrible pallor swells and plunges with irregular, careless and unnatural fluidity; scarlet streaked with glistening, sickly alabaster suggests unfathomable violence. Eyes bloated with violence glimmer a bloodshot azure, twin ebon islands swollen with a palpable terror amid those gruesome oceans; prickling whiskers glitter with a veneer of awful, blackening cinnabar.

"Yes." I again affirm with an enervated listlessness. "Yes, I am."

"P-please, don't kill me. Please. Please." The broken, quaking mewl that issues from between shattered lips, filtering through jagged and broken shards of ivory, threatens to stoke that awful and malignant fire, even as my love's caress soothes it. "Please." He speaks Russian; he perverts that tongue with a pernicious and ugly, thick groan, his tortured evil made manifest. "Please."

"_Shego_... I..."

"It's not worthwhile to kill insects, Kimberly; you may step upon them without notice, but you should never consciously destroy life that is without substance." She speaks to me in _Wu_, those elegant and sonorous strains drifting across me as if the caress of a gilded mist.

"He deserves to die." That protest is alight with a dreadful and angry hatred, even as a cringing resignation to surrender becomes so overpowering. "He deserves death, _Shego_." A peculiar trickling of that most beloved of names from the life of Kimberly Dmitriovna into a language that is no longer foreign. "He should die. He should die." An awareness that I am raving, that those words are coursing from my blood-flecked lips as if a devil's mantra, overtakes me; I know that I have begun to rage in a babel of tongues, of German, Russian, and _Wu_ in alternation, or perhaps at once.

The shivering, animal fear that contorts this demon's broken visage confirms for me that he understands.

"He deserves to die! You deserve to die, you animal! I will kill you; I will break your body and send you to hell!" It is a scream; hideous and warbling, it rises to the heavens even as it plunges with a steely enormity into the bowels of the netherworld. "You will die!" And my hand rises again; no longer guided by the _Tao_, no longer with natural purpose, it nevertheless seethes with a molten strength that wreathes it with a gruesome and lurid midnight.

It falters; shadows wither as if beneath the sun's blazing kiss, dissolving into the ether. There is not that hate throbbing within my breast; there is not that wanton and bestial cruelty; there no longer riots that senseless and fearsome dragon, raging without thought and reason, devoted wholly to the altered state of death. Tumbling before my tear-streaked gaze, slender fingers are released from their steel embrace; again fragile, they tremble with every wracking, breathless pant that convulses me. In that moment, a terror at myself was so nightmarishly manifest, even as a savage and bewildering rapture at the notion of destroying for all eternity this abomination cloaked in human form suffused me with an almost giddy elation.

"_Shego_..." I am weeping, my shoulders consumed by a wrenching quake as horrific, ragged moans tear themselves from the very depths of my soul. "_Shego_..." The brute beneath me no longer stirs; perhaps he has fainted from fear, a fragile and pathetic spirit.

"Kimberly..." A low and mournful murmur, delicately rustling, with a damp and tender warmth, against the hypersensitive flesh of my throat. "Kimberly, it's all right."

"Is it?" That emerges as a brittle and hideous parody of a laugh, wavering with an almost manic intensity. "Is it, _Shego_? I... I don't know what overcame me."

"You were angry; it's your right to feel anger, Kimberly. These... These dreadful and evil men deserve death, yes; but you did not wish to be the one to be their executioner."

"Are they dead?" A dismal and oppressive silence is a more thunderous certain answer than any other. "_Shego_?"

"Some of them." She finally concludes, with a curious and almost laconic sense of resignation. "Some of them."

"Did..."

"Does it matter?" A demand verging upon a fragile, knife-edge impatience.

"_Shego_, I..."

"You did not kill this man with a willful malice; that is what matters." My love admonishes; a gentle and insistent pressure upon my waist, a curious and solemn mockery of the caress that inspires such blissful and breathless delight, seeks to wrench me from atop this barbarian.

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why does that matter, when killing them in... In that odd state does not?"

"You are a warrior, Kimberly; dealing death with your hands or with weapons, you still do not act with malevolence. Your strikes are guided by the _Tao_, not by a sinful and mortal yearning for destruction and cruelty. If you had not stricken them, if you had not descended upon them with a hunter's fury, they would not have shown such restrain for us. You were protecting me, and protecting Ariadne."

"I..." I nevertheless am ill; a racing pulse roars through my temples; my sight blurs and ripples with a surreal and disorienting distortion; a sickly and tortured knot clenches within my stomach, threatening to force itself from lips tacky with a monstrous and hellish dampness. "I still-"

"Do not think of it. I... I know that it troubles you; it troubled me, as well, as it had Bao Li and..." At long last, tugged with an irresistible force, I feel myself unfolding to my complete height; knees seem to slosh and quake with a liquid and enervated frailty; arms, limp and flaccid, offer little more than a pathetic and desultory sway as I'm tugged into the sheltering warmth of Xi Go's embrace, enfolded amidst an angel's wings.

"It is natural to take life, Kimberly, to survive; a lion does not think of its prey; a shark thinks not of the fish that it devours. Existence, the natural order, is a clash of wills and lives; it is a struggle for existence against those that would take your own life. For those so selfish as to destroy for their own indulgence, it is a fitting demise; _Wu Wei_ dictates it as surely as the sun rises and sets for those that interfere with natural harmony." The words do not ring with the profound sense of hollowness that fills my heart amid this slaughter, but they afford me no comfort; sanguine lips tremble as tears continue their miserable and doleful trek along skin blotted with crimson.

"I..." Truly, I can say nothing; words fail me entirely, and I surrender wholly to her embrace, even amidst this chaos and carnage. The vaguest, distant awareness of subdued screams and incredulous shouts, voices upraised in a thrall of abject terror and bewilderment, has begun to trickle into my curiously barren and exhausted senses, but my mind can afford them no notice.

"K-Kimberly?" Another voice rife with a glorious and liquid tenderness that seeps through this senseless and arctic shell; at once, unaccountably, it ignites a hot and terrible fear within my breast, boiling with a manic and irrational certainty of cruel alienation.

"Ariadne." An acknowledgment that I desperately do not wish to offer. Xi Go is a warrior, as well; the spilling of blood in defense of love, in pursuit of a purpose greater than any insipid and temporal desire, is not foreign to her. Ariadne, however, has been tortured by such fury, regardless of the intent that underlies it; a certitude that she will despise me for my violence, that she will revolt at the crushing ferocity that must lie within my warrior's soul, reduces me to quivering, whimpering incognizance.

Ariadne is my friend; a deep and powerful love, even bereft of a lover's passion, sears within my heart for her. And she will reject me; she will abandon me for my viciousness, for the ease with which I have taken life without the slightest restraint and reserve.

"Are you all right, Kimberly? There... I..." A fragile and delicate tone dips to a frightful whisper. "There is so much blood. It's- it's not yours, is it?"

"P-pardon?" Despite a command that I avert my eyes, that I not allow my curiosity to impel my gaze toward the shimmering and beauteous fabric of this beloved gown, that twangs through this wondrous jade nexus, I cannot restrain myself; my bleary and whorling sight beholds a ghastly ocean of scarlet upon crimson, dragons swimming through currents of gore. "Oh, my... My god, _Shego_, it-"

"It's all right, Kimberly; it's all right. Please, do not panic; none of it is yours, or mine, or Ariadne's." That is perhaps not my singular concern, though those fears have rioted above all others; a deeper, sullen, and more subdued horror and disgust at the lifeblood that I have wrung from my adversaries, now staining my clothing as if some sanguine dye, has risen in its stead.

"Thank god." Ariadne finally materializes before me; while lovely pools of fine auburn are agape with a wide and electric bewilderment, a subtle, quirking suggestion of an almost foreign smile creases ruby lips. "Thank god, Kimberly; I was so worried that it was your blood, that you'd been hurt. These- these brutes don't warrant the slightest kernel of your notice; they're not even human anymore." Perhaps I had not expected such a vicious and profoundly heartless sentiment from a beloved friend; a slight twinge of flushed horror flares through me at her words, even as I know them to be true. She, more so than anyone, is entitled to such a certainty; I behold the crushing blow, delivered with a resurgent and furious humanity, that shears into senseless flesh without the slightest trace of astonishment.

Again and again, Ariadne's heels lance with a cruel and remorseless ferocity into the man that I had abandoned in the throes of unfathomable anguish; her features crimson with a scalding, fulminating, and unreasoning rage, a low and anguished moan of almost hellish savagery spilling from jaws agape, she rains blows upon him. Again and again, piercing spines hammer into sensitive and frail flesh; between his thighs, they stroke with a brutality that a suddenly steely gaze appraises with a certain vicious approval.

"Ariadne. Ariadne." Only as Xi Go's slender fingers fasten with an iron firmness upon Ariadne's fragile wrists does the frenzy that convulses my friend recede as if a supernatural haze; tugged away with the utmost tenderness, I realize that her enormous eyes blaze with a liquid fury, tears of unutterable rage streaming along cheeks flushed with animal ferocity. "Ariadne." Xi Go repeats, the stern intensity of her tone finally coaxing her from the depths of that thoughtless anger.

"Y-yes?" As though a child chastised for some trivial mischief, even as her chest heaves with ragged and enormous pants that seem to roar from her parted lips as if a fierce typhoon. "Yes, Miss _Shego_?"

"It's all right, Ariadne. You're safe now."

"This... This worthless beast, this vermin, this... This piece of shit," unaccountably, perhaps childishly, that obscenity startles me more than the frenetic outpouring of brutality, "He deserves much, much more. Kimberly, he... He should die. I should kill him. I should kill him." Whimpering, those words of inhumanity unbefitting of this beautiful woman stream in hot and tormented currents that blaze with a tangible, scarlet anguish from her trembling lips. "I want to kill him."

"Yes, you do, Ariadne; I'm sure that you do. But, you would not wish that." An emphatic shake of Xi Go's head, fine and lustrous locks whispering in a chorus of affirmation across her creamy shoulders. "I know that you would not. You would not forgive yourself for squandering your humanity upon this creature." An illustrative blow, with a careless and easy stroke of a dark heel, upon a stout leg that yields a hideous and resonant crackle of bone through an oppressive silence broken solely by the low, keening whimpers of Du's benighted harem. "Please, believe me, Ariadne."

"He... He, they all hurt me so badly, Miss _Shego_. How can you tell me to forgive them?" She pleads; I realize, quite belatedly, that her gaze has drifted to the glimmering and sleek curves of a blade that tumbled from the stricken hand of one of the fallen animals.

"Forgive?" Tinged with a scorn more abject than words alone could aspire to capture. "Forgive, Ariadne? Is it forgiveness not to murder a fallen and wounded man with a knife?" Her creeping and surreptitious advance toward that lethal shard of steel halts at once. "Do you not take heart in that his life will be short and terrible?"

"W-what do you mean?" Ariadne seems incredulous, even as she begs an answer that will even begin to soothe the molten rage that boils through her dark eyes.

"Have you forgotten a particularly pathetic coward in our midst?" A venomous snarl elevates a niggling sense of some pitiful, shriveled wisp of a diseased and putrefying aura to a supreme focus; my sight penetrates the wilted and murky darkness, beholding the cowering and feeble silhouette of a humiliated Mandarin struggling to evaporate into the shadows.

"Du?" That emerges from my throat as a deep and gurgling whisper, as if I've not spoken for an eternity. That foul and odious wretch's presence gleams as a savage beacon of indescribable evil amid the sullen penumbra; fine, dark silk glimmers with a vague and diffuse luster beneath the mildest of creeping caresses of distant lights as he shivers beside one of the women rendered dead-eyed and vacuous with accumulated miseries and the torturous grip of opium. Their vacant gazes do not even seem to register us, even as mirthless smiles continue to torment me with sorrowful permanence.

Du clings to the sweeping, elegant curtain of one woman's dress beside the table as if a child sheltering in his mother's skirts in the face of a particularly cruel bully. Once bestially confident, ebon shards have opened into vast and yawning, liquid pools of agonized midnight; a whispering suggestion of some feeble and pathetic mewl filters from that huddled creature. It is a struggle not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of that outrageous and evil spectacle, of a man so powerful in this diseased world of wealth and privilege that he had been emboldened to claim the seemingly weak and defenseless as property, now struggling to vanish into the shadows.

"Get up, Yueshang." Even that grave affront cannot wrest him from this inarticulate and shivering terror. "Get up, Big Ears." Another jab that yields nothing but perhaps a deepening of this man-child's dread; a simmering and piteous trickle of burgundy begins to suffuse an otherwise pure and vulgar, arctic azure.

"Get your ass up, Big Ears; I'll kill you if you don't." Even I am consumed with a sudden and convulsive terror at the raw and vicious brutality with which that is spoken; harsh and gruff, my beloved's tender and dulcet tones, a sonorous and majestic melody of liquid gold, have been warped into a jagged razor, shearing through one's very soul with a serrated savagery. There is no doubt that she will; jade has become impenetrably, impossibly dark, conjured into a shadow that eclipses the mellow incandescence as if some evil moon. It is not the black sun that blazed from my hand, but seems no less purposeful.

"P-please, I think that we can discuss-"

"Shut up." My wife speaks as if possessed, molten currents of hate deluging from within her; Du is the target of her loathing, enveloped by those suffocating tendrils as if in the grip of an impossible monster. The further widening of his already implausibly enormous, glimmering eyes signifies that it is not merely to my sight alone that this fury has been unveiled; intangible power has transgressed upon physical reality, and something unfathomable has been unleashed. "Shut your fucking mouth, Yueshang. I never would have expected that such a superstitious thug as yourself would fail to recognize _Xian_."

If at all possible, his terror swells to magnitudes unimaginable; a sickly, diseased carrion flower of harsh and horrified burgundy, it unfurls around him, staining everything in his midst with a ghoulish and inhuman aura. Eyes virtually burst from his flat features, contorted with a fear that renders him virtually mindless, seemingly beyond any suggestion of awareness; and, yet, his gaze remains anchored inseparably to Xi Go as the quiet, ominous clatter of heels signals the inexorable advance of his waking nightmare in a sweeping tide of emerald.

"_X-Xiannu_." A cringing awareness, acknowledged with a torturous finality that suggests a certainty of imminent mortality; perhaps he prays for the release of death, the quiet and gentle embrace of the grave, even if it will usher him into the courts of Yen Lo Wang. "_Xiannu_."

"Yes, Yueshang; _Xiannu_. Both of us. Or, did you not recognize that power? We would have paid you handsomely with heaven's own gold to release this beautiful young woman from your diseased bondage; instead, you will be paid with something less..." A bestial quirk of full lips with a malice that I have never before witnessed, "Pleasant."

"Please, _Xiannu_ Go Xi. Please, I beg of you. I- I am a stupid man; I am but a poor and humble peasant, and-"

"Still your protests, Yueshang." My love looms massively above him; transcending her mere physical height, her presence is that of a giant. It eclipses anything within imagination; anything so insipid would cower in equal, unreasoning fear before the monstrous, flaring, roiling cauldron of ferocity that churns from her. "Silence your whimpers; they will not move me. You should know better than to throw yourself upon an immortal's mercy. Have you ever heard of Monkey staying his hand or staff against a wicked foe, or _Xian_ Lu sheathing his sword in the presence of a demon? I am not Guanyin, Yueshang." A sardonic beat. "Big Ears."

"Please, have mercy upon me. I- I am a fool; my mind is ravaged with opium. I am not thinking clearly." A brutal stroke lifts him to his feet; barely do even I perceive the lash of her hand, even as an impossible thunderclap resounds with deafening enormity throughout the hall.

"You were not thinking clearly? For how long have you not been thinking clearly, Big Ears? Tell me this; grant me this indulgence." An unremitting tide of pathetic squeals wrings itself from his throat as he realizes that his silk-clad feet do not brush against the fine marble with every wriggle in an invisible grasp. Xi Go's slender arms remain interlaced upon the gentle swell of her chest; the ferocious grip of those ethereal hands is abundantly manifest in the harsh, quivering mewls that seep from broken lips streaming with blood. He sounds a child, or a tortured animal, struggling to cling to its final breaths.

"I will tear you in half, Big Ears, if I do not hear anything from you. I would not tell you for how long I will wait; I am sure that so dreadful an animal as yourself never learned to count." Unaccountably, I pity this pathetic monster as it lies suspended in agony; it seems the tortures of Ivan _Groznyii_'s prisons, horrible cries continuing to flood from within a feeble chest sagging as though in the throes of crucifixion. I barely recognize my love in the throes of such awful brutality; even Ariadne averts her gaze, deep auburn pools falling to the glimmering pallor that lies beneath us, as hellish crackles issue from a ravaged body.

"Tell me, Yueshang!"

"I- I do not know! I am sorry! What- what do you expect from me?" Breathless gurgles, barely a facsimile of humanity lingering within his straining speech. "What do you expect from me?"

At once, I feel it; lapping gently at the molten fringes of her raw, quivering, raging hatred, there is something positively nightmarish; a living shadow, liquid darkness; it seems evil incarnate, channeled from the depths of festering pain long-suppressed. It terrifies me; it is the essence of that penumbra that consumed my hand, that craved the blood of a fallen and stricken foe, but magnified and purified, refined to concentrated bloodlust.

A black grin leers from that oblivion, alight with an inhuman glee at the looming fruition of its most hideous yearnings. It brandishes a rapture that I know could never coexist with the beauteous spirit that lies within my beloved; it is the antithesis of love, a pain and grief and warbling torment that smiles with insincere and malevolent eyes; it is not Xi Go. It is a nightmare past, a torturous and terrible and unforgivable series of affronts and cruelties unaddressed that cry out for vengeance, no longer content with an unattainable justice. It is a young girl in the grip of grinding poverty, wailing at the pain that she cannot understand; it is a young woman flowering into beauty with no sense of her own worth, reduced to a slave; it is an apprentice, struggling with the wanton malice and gleeful depredations of her vicious master; it is a newborn goddess without companionship, without love, without anything to stave off her sorrow.

It is not Xi Go, and it threatens to devour her as assuredly as it had me.

"What do you want from me? Please, tell me! In- in all that is sacred, please! Please!" Quiet, sickening pops and crackles issue from a body upon the brink of destruction, sobbing whimpers supplanting that haughty and pernicious imperiousness. "Please! Please!"

"What do I want, Yueshang?" That is not Xi Go's voice; it cannot be. It has never been so dead, so detached, so cold that I am consumed with a terrific shiver. "What is it that I want?"

"Please, _Shego_." My own voice, at long last, struggles through that ocean of pure void. "Please, _Shego_."

"What is it, Kimberly?" I pray for that voice to recede, for my love to return, even as my legs bear me forward in the throes of trembling agony, dread, and despair.

"Please, do not say what you feel right now; do not give voice to that." I feel as if I am Xi Go as she counseled me, imploring me not to succumb to that irresistible temptation.

"Do not say what, Kimberly?" A perfectly genial and thoughtful tone, alight with a joy that I cannot reconcile with her present fury.

"Please, _Shego_. You... You love me so much that you prevented me from committing a terrible and unforgivable mistake."

"What was that, Kimberly?" The anguish speaks; jade becomes streaked with a monstrous and impure garnet.

"Please, you know what I'm talking about, _Shego_. Please." With pure courage, this hellish tableau is permitted to grow larger and larger, each step straining against a fear that is more awful than anything I could have envisioned.

"What is that, Kimberly?"

"Let me go! Let me go! Please! Please! You're- you're breaking me-"

"Shut up!" My love roars with a voice not her own, even as some shivering anxiety lurches through that black violence. "Shut up!"

"It hurts! It hurts!" His screams are more awful than anything I have ever heard from a mortal soul; he truly is an animal, unreasoning and thoughtless with a pain unfathomable. "It hurts! Please, _Xiannu_! Have mercy upon me!"

"I am not Guanyin, Yueshang, as I have said." A deathly and brutal chuckle that renders the blood hammering through my temples, throbbing through my veins with a furious urgency, liquid ice. "I want you to die."

"No!" That shriek is mine, and unfathomable torment claims me as those nightmare invisible hands grip me in his stead; a furious, shredding pressure that threatens to rend me asunder with a single stroke as my scream rises to a hellish crescendo. The fabric of reality itself seems to distend; my sight becomes streaked with a sanguine, molten crimson that swims and shivers with a torment unspeakable and indescribable; sight evaporates entirely, even as my vision lapses into that terrible gray definition.

I'm being torn apart, it occurs to me with a curiously vague and dreamy disorientation; arms seem to separate from their proper anchorage, my legs tugged as if upon the rack. The pain is so horrific that it transcends any capacity for human perception; it seems to wither into nothingness, so great is the enormity of that agony. I can no longer even scream; so prosaic an expression of my anguish is simply trivial.

As darkness washes across me, glistening motes of stars drifting through that endless night sky, a peculiar and serene smile settles upon my lips, however torturous even that gentle quirking is. I have preserved my love's soul; her spirit will endure without that terrible scarlet blemish; I do bear no grudge, and I hope with a fervent and desperate intensity that she will forgive me.

"Kimberly! Kimberly! Oh, please, do- do not... Not now! No!" Through this terrible and dreadful darkness, peering through this peculiar and cloudless sky within which a vast ocean of stars gleams, her wondrous and sonorous splendor drifts. It seems a dream; perhaps the fulfillment of a final wish, ushering me into another life with the certain knowledge of her warmth awaiting me following that terrible but ephemeral perdition.

"Do not die; I will not allow this, Kimberly. I- I would rather give my life now, no matter how selfish it may be, for you to live. I will not see you die again, Kimberly; I will not suffer this for another eternity." This is not comfort for a looming and unutterably awful separation; her scream, her wailing and nightmarish shriek, shears through this inky and surreal veil as a crushing warmth settles upon me. I cannot bear it; my love is consumed with a torment beyond description, beyond imagination; my soul cries out in an agony that I cannot endure a moment further; my very being quakes with sorrow and suffering.

"I will loose my power to save you, Kimberly. I- I know that it is unforgivable, but I cannot think of another life without you. You... You will perhaps never remember me, Kimberly; you will learn to live a life without me. P-perhaps," a cringing and awful, muffled whimper, "Perhaps I will be led to you again, if the Jade Emperor shows pity. I am so sorry, Kimberly, but this... This is something that I cannot endure again."

Open your eyes. Open your eyes, damn you! Open your eyes! Open them! I wail and howl and sob into this blackness, commanding my body again and again to respond until even this inner voice seems hoarse. I will destroy myself, as well, the instant that I awaken from this torpor; even if I must betray my eternal beloved's sacrifice, better I live not a second further.

"I am sorry, Kimberly."

"No!" At long last, a cry that resounds beyond this terrible and deathly void. "No! No!"

"K-"

"Do not! I'll never forgive you, _Shego_! I will never forgive you!" I bawl, realizing that true, human sensation, a savage and crippling heat radiating through every reach of my tortured body, has returned to me; my cheeks are icy with a nightmare deluge of tears that continues to inundate skin blazing with a resurgent inner warmth.

"F-for what?" A whisper of the utmost torment, even as she struggles to feign some outlandish obliviousness.

"For what you said; that you were willing to sacrifice yourself for my sake, for your own selfishness. I... I would hate you; I would kill myself the second that I awoke, _Shego_."

"Kimberly, I-"

"Do not! Don't... Don't say anything." I can merely command this through a dismal haze of tears, wracked with an unfathomable agony at the merest thought of even a single moment deprived of her love, of her tender and nurturing warmth.

"Kimberly-"

"I forgive you, _Shego_, but... Just- just, don't say anything. Please." My exhortation is that of utter desperation, pleading for her not to confront me with these ridiculous deceptions that raise the unimaginable and unfathomable into further and more terrible relief.

"I... I understand." The awareness that her voice no longer caresses my ears is a blissful epiphany; a straining and radiant certainty that our souls have not been sundered, that our beauteous and incomparable bond continues to writhe and ripple with that transcendental link. "I'm sorry, Kimberly. I... You had heard the terrible thoughts of my soul. Not- not for an instant were we parted; my very fears were given voice, even as I knew that you would survive." I do believe her; that frenetic, urgent, jumbled stream of thoughts cried out in a cruel and dissonant polyphony of screams, each rising at once into a roar of wrenching dread.

"Thank you, Kimberly." That ghosts through every nerve as if the most achingly tender of caresses; an intimate stroke along the very fabric of my soul, alight with a rich, radiant, and ascendant rapture. "Thank you. You... Your courage, your strength, I... I am in awe of you, as always. You have saved me; again, you have preserved my very soul."

"You... You did not kill him?"

"No, my Love. I... I could not; you absorbed that final, terrible blow; you suffered such anguish for the sake of a demon, merely so that I would not be bloodied. I... I am so gracious to you, Kimberly; even if you had forgiven me, I fear that I would never have felt worthy of touching you with hands so stained, with a soul so corrupted by that evil."

"It is as I felt, _Shego_; and you preserved my own spirit." Startlingly, a mild, wretchedly feeble ghost of a laugh actually trickles from my lips, galling at a throat arid and raw with the relentless, galling fury of a desert wind. "You had saved me as surely as I had you, and yet I had not once thanked you, _Shego_."

"Kimberly, I..."

"I know how desperately awful that compulsion is; I could actually feel it; I could see it, _Shego_, massive and raw and positively mad, clamoring for release. I'm... I'm astonished that I could actually survive that."

"Do not ever, ever even suggest otherwise, My Kimberly." A harsh and leaden command, bereft of even the subtlest trace of humor. "Do not ever, ever even think of the possibility. I... I live for you; you are the reason for which I exist, for which my spirit and body persevere even when I fear that I cannot endure a further day awash in that agony. And, when we are united again, you consume me with a joy and love that becomes deeper and deeper with every passing instant.

"I would rather die than see..." A harsh, ragged, panting whimper as that most unfathomable of nightmares plays across her mind, shivers through this jade thread, as if some hellish, shuddering phantasm. "Than see you parted from me again, Kimberly."

"We never will." A solemn and earnest vow, one sealed by the wondrous, blissful warmth of her lips settling upon me; a kiss that seems to throb into a glorious and transcendental eternity, soaring through the heavens as a beauteous and incomparable sense of perfection mends and revives tortured and broken flesh. And I am whole again; life lurches into that surreal, gray definition before it is consumed with a lively and glorious color that resolves into the image of divinity beyond rival. "_Shego_!" A cry of utter bliss vaults, rising into the glorious infinite, as anguished and bitterly protesting limbs are forced around her, crushing her to me with a seething passion born of desperation unimaginable.

"_Shego_!" Again, through the veil of death, however frail and ephemeral, we are reunited.

"I never left, Kimberly; I promise you that." A low and comforting murmur; everything has vanished from my thoughts, from my sight, but Xi Go, my lover and my eternity. The seemingly inexorable onset of that darkness, a cruel and black hand that would not be stayed in its relentless grip upon my spirit, has receded with the radiant flare of our joined souls; and yet its taint lingers, an awful and almost tangible smear of shadow that endures as some monstrous visitation that refuses to quit that beauteous core of my being. "I promise you, Kimberly; I... I was with you; I never once thought of departing, of abandoning you, even if it were for your sake. What- what you felt-"

"Didn't I ask you to be quiet, _Shego_?" She starts at the sudden, wry rustle of a whisper from between my lips, before they join with her own again. "I forgive you."

"Death had you in its grasp, Kimberly; it was only with the force of your will that it released you." And I'm convulsed with a shuddering and terrible horror at that; I know it to be true. The blackness, that awful and all-devouring void, grinned in those final few instants; its hideous jaws closed, favoring me with but a torturous, cruel smile of the utmost patience as my unrelenting struggle drove it away. It has marked me as surely as Xi Go's jade luster, and the savage, urgent certainty that I must deftly perfect myself has risen again into awful and unendurable relief.

"I know, _Shego_. I..." I had never envisioned that death, Death, would be so tangible; that it would arrive as some abomination cloaked in shadow, even of the delicate and gauzy tenderness of finest silk, to swallow my spirit; to usher me away from this joy again with its relentless and vindictive fury. It seemed enraged with my perpetual escape, even as it writhed with a palpable delight at claiming me in its grasp. "I saw it; I felt it. What... What was that?"

"Death, Kimberly; but, you have escaped it. You are more powerful than you ever have been; more than I could ever hope or believe. What... What I would have inflicted upon Du was something that would have torn him apart, and yet you weathered it with barely a whimper. You're so strong." Convulsed with an enduring agony that has yet to recede into the nebulous darkness of memory, I hardly am so overcome with that certainty; my arms fastened around my beloved with an unyielding desperation, unwilling to part from this glorious and delirious warmth, strength is not of utmost concern.

I begin to weep; low, whimpering, mewling cries that seep forth from between us; liquid grief that stains without relent the soaring joy that envelops us. Sobs, awful, wracking, and unremitting, begin to flood from me; bawling, I realize that I seem a wounded child, wailing and shrieking with a rending anguish that consumes me more fiercely than any physical pain. I had not even realized how near I had forced myself to that cruel precipice; the epiphany that I stood upon the brink of that unfathomable loss, teetering above the void, envelops me in a sanguine mist of tortured grief and regret. I have preserved her soul, and yet I have clashed with Death in a battle that should never have been entered for the sake of a soul beyond redemption, beyond perhaps even mere perdition.

"Kimberly..." The low, soothing strains of her voice seem, amidst this strangling and breathless mist of pure, clenching terror, little more than a few droplets upon a roiling inferno; the blaze will not, cannot, be stilled, and yet still she holds me. Powerful and sleek arms tense around me with a pressure that feels as if it will buckle my very body and collapse me into her transcendental warmth, and I embrace it; even the most crushingly savage embrace is but the subtlest prickle of discomfort, imperceptible as a whisper amid an angelic chorus. "It's all right, Kimberly; I promise you that. I promise you."

"I love you. I love you. I love you." A frantic, garbled mantra that spills from what feels the ruptured dam of my spirit; an inundation of pure, shuddering emotion without restraint, without the possibility of restraint, coursing around us. We drown within its gleaming enormity, and yet are not washed away from this world; we remain steadfast, a gilded splendor rising from that brackish murk of fear and doubt.

"You've saved me, Kimberly."

"And you have me, _Shego_. You... It was your voice that called me back; it always will. I will never leave you, _Shego_; I will never allow myself to go."

"Everything will be all right." A whisper, emphatic and hot, of the utmost certainty and finality. "You have never been more powerful, Kimberly."

"More than Bao Li?" A sense of utter incredulity wells from within me at that, surging further at the tenderest of almost girlish giggles that issues from my love. "W-what is it?"

"You are Bao Li; she is you; you are everything, Kimberly. And, yes, more than you were then. Did you not see that I was still beside you, even fighting with the utmost ferocity? I was barely restraining myself so that Ariadne would not be injured in the battle. You are guided even more gracefully by the _Tao_ than I."

"That's... That's silly." A quiet and bashful protest, striking me with the peculiar familiarity of reddening cheeks, even beneath a scalding veneer of tears. The notion of eclipsing this image of the divine, a true goddess transcending time and life, is inconceivable; I rather revolt at it, and I've no doubt that I will never accept it.

"And always so beautifully modest, my Love." Without the subtlest suggestion of effort, a sense of singular weightlessness overtakes me as I am borne skyward in her embrace; the dismal, penetrating chill of marble recedes before the all-consuming splendor of a warmth that engulfs me wholly in a lovely scarlet haze.

"It's the truth, _Shego_. I'm... I'm forever in awe of you." Those words, it occurs to me, resound beyond this single life; they throb and roar throughout a history of soaring, glorious delight and plunging nadirs of grief and anguish. "I love you."

"As I love you, My Kimberly; I exist solely to love you, to shelter you in my embrace at every moment of every day." A fine trickle of liquid flame across my skin wrings a startled gasp from my lips, eyes lunging open again to behold a gleaming mist swimming across eyes of the most beauteous emerald perfection. Tears trickle with an aching, cruel advance of diamond radiance as if purest water along alabaster, and I cannot restrain the yearning to again kiss her. Lips brush with deliberate, delicate reassurance across creamy and unblemished skin aflame with a molten anxiety; the seawater torment of tears vanishes beneath them, scoured away at last from her glorious gaze; at long last, pale ruby is claimed with incomparable tenderness, an unhurried and effortless kiss that endures with breathless splendor for limitless eternities.

Regardless of the stilled chaos that surrounds us, we remain interwoven, oblivious to everything; not even the vague awareness of Ariadne's presence can sunder this embrace; a selfish, hopelessly indulgent delight that finally draws me away from the image of that looming abyss. Death trickles away into distant nothingness; that fear and anguish are driven away as if shadows before a raging inferno, scorched into submission with blazing rays of pure rapture.

Even parting, I realize that we remain intertwined with a strength that deepens and swells with every moment that we bask in that radiant perfection; a shimmering bond that has grown ever more powerful, unyielding and steadfast before even the onrush of forces beyond life itself.

"Thank you, Kimberly." A mild and delicate whisper that seeps through my very soul as if a trickle of liquid ecstasy.

"For what?"

"For saving me, yet again. I... I know that you would have forgiven me, but I would perhaps not have forgiven myself for wasting my humanity upon such a wretch." If anything, Xi Go appears startlingly abashed, as though astounded by the depths of her own raging, irrepressible fury. "I... I don't even know what came over me. I felt so much agony from Ariadne, and, seeing this man, I-"

"I understand." I do, without question; however monstrous that cringing, inhuman anguish had been, I cannot deny the vicious and bestial delight that welled within me to witness a man of such power suspended as if some ghoulish marionette, wracked with unimaginable suffering with each twinging tug at his invisible strings. "I understand, _Shego_. I... I was prepared to do much the same."

"He is alive, however." She reassures me with a flicker of something I've no doubt is the utmost regret. "He is alive, lamentably." An almost petulant suggestion of a smile.

"Where is he?"

"Behind us. I... I feared that even glimpsing him would invite that awful hate anew." Nestled against the lovely, inviting warmth of my wife's willowy and glorious throat, I can perceive nothing but her splendor unfolding before me; nothing but the fragrant, ebon majesty of her locks spilling with a free and wild glory across her shoulders.

"There is something that I would wish to ask him."

"That man?" An incredulous gasp. "Whatever would you ask him?"

"Only he can answer it." A beat as a mild anxiety strains within my lover's jaw. "I'm sorry, _Shego_."

"No. No. I... I'm merely afraid that I'll need to prevent you from killing him."

"Perhaps." There is no trace of wry humor; I sincerely do not know what my reaction to that abomination will be, even so pitifully stricken. But, I find myself plunging from that graceful, soaring flight, trembling legs unfolding beneath me to support a weight that suddenly seems so intolerably acute in the void of her embrace.

"Kimberly?" A mild and startling tremor ripples through her solemn and quiet voice, but I can no longer be restrained; perhaps it is no longer a black and brutal vengeance that convulses me, but I can no longer abide this unresolved, wracking need for resolution. Xi Go pivots upon towering heels as I negotiate the carpet of the dead and crippled, a sickly and sanguine tang sweeping over me in a putrid tide that raises distant, awful images of the riots.

"Yueshang." That name erupts from my lips as if the bitterest of venoms, spewed with a hate that resonates from the very depths of my soul. "Yueshang." I command again; the wretch lies sprawled in a piteous, whimpering heap, as if a tormented child. Huddled amidst a draping shroud of deep and lustrous, luxuriant silk, it is obvious how enfeebled he has become from the pernicious, corrosive evil of which he has partaken so rapaciously. Surrounded by the death and carnage of his own creation, he nevertheless seems singularly pitiful, as though a wounded and terrible animal confronted with its hunters. My eyes drift along his fragile and pathetic form, falling upon the ghoulish image of a trio of some repellent, shriveled forms knotted to the small of his back, swaying with a mocking exuberance with each shuddering, panting sob.

"Yueshang!" As though amplified, my roar thunders through the hall; at long last, with merely the minutest, terrified whimper of acknowledgment, body consumed by convulsive tremors, this wretch succeeds in throwing himself with a torturous effort upon his back. A gaunt and ashen face is streaked with awful tears of which such a demon is undeserving; they spill with an effortless enormity from eyes widened and unblinking with a mortal anguish. "Yueshang."

"Please. Please. Don' hurt me." He sounds as if an infant, gibbering his exhortation to ears that I fear may soon become deaf to his grief.

"Is it painful, Yueshang?" It overtly is; his very soul writhes with a palpable haze of torment beyond what even the cruelest of Inquisitions could achieve. A vast and malevolent hand has raked through his spirit with rending talons, shearing through a heart and mind steeled and blackened with his accumulated barbarities; what lies in its wake is tattered, broken, but no less dreadful.

"Y-yes. Yes."

"I fear to tell you that you will not die." Dismayingly, his soul has not yet begun to trickle in pathetic currents from his broken form; it will remain anchored to this wretched body.

"W-who are you? Who are you? Are you a demon?"

"Be silent, Yueshang." I've no patience for such a devil; certainly none to be accused of being a demon. "Be silent, or I will crush you; I have saved your wicked and worthless life, and it is my prerogative to take it if I so desire." Never before this instant would I have believed that these words would spill from my own lips, in my own voice, as the harvest of my own thoughts and convictions. This is not the thundering resound of a long-past warrior spirit, of Bao Li and her furious strength; this is Kimberly. Perhaps not Kimberly Dmitriovna, but very much myself; that thought allows a smile to crease my lips as if a rose in fullest blossom.

"I... I apologize." This most powerful of men grovels before a girl. "Please, forgive me, _Xiannu_. Please, have mercy upon me; take pity upon me. Do-do not kill me, I beg of you. I beg of you. Please. I... I will do anything; anything to soothe your fury. I will- I will hold rituals; I will shower the Taoists with gold; I will give you anything that you want."

"That is why I know that your life is not one worth claiming, Yueshang; why your soul is as heavy as lead, even as it is more worthless than copper. You have not once apologized to me for your cruelties; you have not once begged forgiveness for the evil that you have wrought, Yueshang." And, yet, I kneel beside him as if the Bodhisattva; with an effortless and fluid grace, I fold onto one knee, easing beside this devil cloying with opium.

"Whatever do you mean-"

"Be silent." However I shiver with disgust as the slightest contact with this abomination, my fury cannot be stilled; the crack of my palm upon a tissue paper cheek raises a blazing welter and a fine streak of vermillion that seeps in agonizing trickles along broken and bruised flesh. "Do not presume to ask anything of _Xiannu_, Yueshang. You have been abandoned; your guardians, your treasonous and vile Russians, have died or lie broken before you; the women that you have enslaved cannot even see what suffering is being visited upon their worthless and humbled master.

"Does it not feel most singular, Yueshang, to know that the women whom you brutishly coveted as whores have reduced you to this? That we have subordinated you; that you are a slave to every desire, every whim. My love, my wife," a gratification beyond articulation ripples through me at his pathetic and gnashing snarl that tumbles with noiseless frailty into the depths of his agony, "Spared you at my request. It is our prerogative to spare you, and I think that is perhaps cruelest of all for you, isn't it?"

I confront complete silence, broken by another slap, as if upon a petulant child.

"Answer me, Yueshang. Does this not humiliate you? Does this not make you desire the embrace of death, even knowing what awaits you? Answer me, or I will see to it that you are delivered unto your enemies in this state, ravaged and inviting their sundry cruelties. I suspect that they would be much more imaginative than I." As this vicious command streams from within me, eloquence stirred by my disgust and revulsion, a silent and serene certainty that he is not worthy of a killing blow stills those fears that I would destroy him without further thought.

"Answer me."

"Yes. I... I am humiliated by you. You are women, and yet-"

"I did not ask for explanation, Yueshang." Another blow. "You are a slave; do not speak to your mistress as if you are an equal, or ever could be. I feel sickened to even breathe the air that you have befouled." Xi Go does not interrupt this gloating; it's a relief that she does not, that she trusts that I can restrain those bestial impulses that remain with such furious and brutal presence in the fringes of my mind. They lie cloaked, crouching in stifling shadow, and yet I've no doubt that they would spring forth with an avid malice if afforded the briefest opportunity.

"Ariadne?" It feels as if an eternity has passed since I have spoken her name, and yet she has remained beside us, silent and accepting, as if resigned to her role as but an observer in this drama.

"K-Kimberly, I..." A quiet and tortured murmur, as if consumed by an indescribable anguish; it raises a brief flicker of dismay, but not remorse or regret, for the brazen embrace that Xi Go and I shared. It was not to torment my friend further in her loss, but a cringing knot nevertheless settles within my stomach; a yearning to alleviate that sorrow buoys with a frantic enormity within me.

"Please, come, Ariadne. I... I know that you would never again wish to glimpse this brute, but I desire for you to behold his humiliation, his ruination." I do; a craving for her to savor his destruction is overpowering, a bequest in consolation for the unwitting rejection that I know will torment her in its terrible and enduring loss.

"Kimberly, I will." A quiet, rhythmic percussion of heels upon the grandiose marble, now stained scarlet with ghoulish smears of departed lives, places Ariadne beside me. While I loathe to permit my gaze to stray from the exquisite spectacle of this humbled king, a brief flicker of my eyes yields a tortured storm of clashing emotions flaring through lovely and limpid chestnut pools rendered turbid with swirling currents of hate, fear, dread, and rage; slender fingers quake with an unutterable yearning for violence that boils forth in momentous plumes of scarlet seething with an electric azure aura.

"Do you know who I am?" Astonishingly, Ariadne also speaks _Wu_, albeit with a halting and brittle tone raw with barely subdued emotion. "Do you know who I am?"

"A whore." That petulant defiance astonishes me; perhaps less, however, than the blow that my enduring friend delivers to his fragile chest. The parting of bone resounds with a savage crackle, and I fear that I will be forced to intervene as Xi Go had with me, and I her. Quiet, piteous gurgles seep with a fine trickle of blood from his pursed and drawn lips, and his hands, shuddering with a wondrous torment, clasp upon his broken body.

"I am not a whore." A stern and steely whisper, of the utmost, elegant dignity that revives wholly my image of the Ariadne of Saint Petersburg; a lady of retiring grace and refinement, almost dainty, even with the stiletto point of one heel lodged in this brute's chest. "I am not a whore."

"Her name is Ariadne, Yueshang." I do not offer her patronymic or surname; they mean nothing with a wretched beast of a father. "She is my friend. Do you understand now why we were so eager to liberate her from this hell?" Eyes widen further with a liquid and beautiful terror that invokes the soaring chorus of angelic delight within my soul. "I love Ariadne very deeply, Yueshang, and I wonder why you were so reticent to release her. Do you not have quite enough women to abuse, Yueshang?" His silken Mandarin's garb has become slick with fine rivulets of blood, and I wince at the contact of that diseased filth as fine fingers become steel anew upon such squandered extravagance. My voice has risen to a severe and malevolent pitch, a twitching, relentless compulsion shivering through my hands that seems to command another blow, and another, and another.

"Answer me, Yueshang."

"She is very valuable." Finally, a whispered and almost abashed reply.

"I am aware of that, you simpleton." I laugh; consumed by this vicious and vindictive thrall, I actually laugh, a terrible, airy, and exaggeratedly languid bark of cruelty. "I am quite aware of how valuable my friend is; but I can see that you are not. But, would you care to explain, Yueshang, why you would not part with her for a mountain of gold?"

"She is more valuable than any amount you could carry." A cryptic wheeze, little more than a monotone shiver of a murmur.

"Kimberly, this-"

"No." I'm astonished that Ariadne would interrupt him, but I silence her with a terseness that conjures a guilty flush into my cheeks. "Why is she, Yueshang? I would imagine that a heap of gold-"

"She is adored by a very special client." Finally, Yueshang cooperates, even as Ariadne is consumed by this unaccountable reticence.

"It does not matter, Kimberly." My friend interrupts again, her lovely tones reduced to a pitiful and almost pleading whimper. "Why- why does it matter? Should we not just leave? I'm- I'm sure that the police-"

"They will not enter." Xi Go, jarringly, speaks. "They will find it quite impossible until we are prepared."

"There's no need to be concerned about that, Ariadne." My eyes briefly relax their triumphant grip upon Yueshang to behold my beloved friend wracked with an unsuppressed dread, fine features ashen and full lips drawn to a taut seam. "Ariadne?"

"Kimberly, I..."

"He's a very wealthy client; he pays piles of money for this one." Yueshang speaks as if entranced, a low, slurred stream of syllables trickling from broken lips.

"Kimberly, he's-"

"Won't have anybody else; always needs this one. I asked him why, he told me that she's 'mportant; dunno why." Yueshang is not dying; he teeters upon the cusp of incapacitation, however, weighty lids drooping miserably upon glazed chips of onyx.

"He's lying. There's- there's no one like that-"

"Why else'd I keep this... This girl," even in his stupor, he seems to dread the prospect of retribution, biting back that vulgar word that would send my fist plunging into a pulverized chest, "'Less someone wan... Wanted her."

"Who?" Who is this monster? Who is this pernicious and unforgivable beast who will fall beneath my fury? "Who is it, Yueshang? What is his name?"

"I dunno."

"Tell me his name, or I'll allow my wife to tear you in half." A savage tension grips him, eyes flaring open with the straining pressure that bulges upon his throat at the further contortion of his costume, and yet he refuses to answer. "Who?"

"T-tellin' you the truth, _X-Xiannu_... Guy... Guy... Dunno the guy's name; never gives it. He... He 'dores that girl."

"You know nothing about him?"

"Big-big man. Startin'-startin' to go from the dragon, though."

"What?"

"O-opium. Startin'... Startin' to lose it from opium, _Xiannu_. He- he's massive. Really, really big guy. I- he comes with this girl, and... I dunno what they do with her, but..."

"What is his name, Yueshang?"

"Why?"

"If you don't tell me anything, everything, you will not survive the night."

"Can't tell you 'is name, 'cause I dunno it..." Yueshang's lucidity has begun to dissolve again; even the fiercest, asphyxiating tension yields little more than a mild flicker of awareness.

"Does he call himself anything?"

"M-Mister V. That's it. E-even 'f you kill- kill me, I can't... Can't tell you anything else."

"Do you promise me this, Yueshang?" My gaze locked furiously with his, I'm overcome with the sense that his very thoughts are bared to a stare that penetrates into the very depths of a diseased and pernicious soul. With the narrowest of focus, I struggle to confine myself merely to this; to glimpse, in the wild and disoriented whirl of his sightless eyes, any effort at deception. There is none.

"P-promise, _Xiannu_. I-I promise."

"I..." However that vengeful, blazing savagery may have ebbed to a cool nadir, the notion of abandoning this bestial creature to life, ensconced amongst his odious luxuries and consumed by the pernicious and cruel satisfaction of his vulgar depredations, ignites a renewed flood of swollen and insufferable torment. It does not seem so much a matter of vengeance, of retribution, as it is mere justice to rid this world of so abominable an evil as this; perhaps compassion to sunder him from his own blighted and vile compulsions. It seems liberation from whatever demonic presence has possessed a once pure and untarnished soul, warping gentle and serene childhood into such monstrous, wanton barbarity.

"He will suffer a life of wretched pain from these injuries, Kimberly; no physician can mend them." At once, as those pathetic, glassy beads finally vanish beneath a curtain of caramel flesh, this fierce and savage focus, this throbbing and vigorous conviction and steely intensity, evaporates; a welter of enervation swims through me, a relentless and insatiable predator that devours with avid and hungry rapacity every trace of that singularly supernatural strength that had once suffused every tendon with a quaking ferocity.

It is as if my love's words have wholly quenched the lingering embers of a fiery compulsion for retribution that once raged and howled with infernal enormity; now, sagging with an exhausted rush of breath from a throat ragged with snarling hatred upon the icy chill of the marble, I feel nothing but a fervent yearning to be rid of this waking nightmare. I crave an immediate distance from this charnel house, awash in the nightmarish, metallic tang of blood and the swelling, sense-scouring odor of fading life; those that continue to draw breath in unhurried, eerily serene gasps exude an aura of taint more awful than the dead.

A yearning to evaporate from this; for, with that curious, blinking celerity, Xi Go to usher us away from this earthly glimpse of some bloodied hell.

"_Shego_?" The gentlest of caresses lingers upon my bare shoulder, a glorious warmth settling across skin chilled with this abominable, dead palace's arctic evil.

"Yes, Kimberly?"

"I'd like to go home, _Shego_." A sentiment that's perhaps as desperately childish as it is irrepressibly urgent, clamoring for release from this.

"Of course, Kimberly." And I'm borne aloft again with an effortless and easy grace, though we do not take flight away from this; my mind at once drifts to Ariadne, deep and tortured eyes glazed with some impossible and indecipherable emotion as they bore into the fallen and crippled form of her captor.

"Ariadne?" A beat, extending into an insufferable eternity of silence. "Ariadne? Are-are you all right, Ariadne?"

"I have nowhere to go, Kimberly." Gaze anchored unyieldingly upon Du, she refuses to shift in even the slightest degree; her heels do not rise by a single inch; she seems bound by some demonic spell to this awful hall.

"W-what do you mean, Ariadne? You..." That sentence dies a death of utter ignominy in the depths of my throat. Would I desire to return with a woman that I loved with a passion blazing with Apollo's fury and her wife; would I wish to be tormented eternally by the unutterable cruelty of that wondrous and beauteous, natural adoration between lovers that would now escape me?

"You must want to rest for even tonight." A feeble and awkward conclusion.

"With you?" My thoughts are painfully transparent, I realize. "With you and Miss _Shego_, Kimberly?" The mildest quiver of a laugh, anguished but without any enduring bitterness or malice, eases from within her; it's a terrible, cruel parody of mirth, a poisoned dagger into the black heart of an uncaring universe and its awful sense of irony.

"I..."

"You are in love, Kimberly; I cannot begrudge you that, as I would hope that you would not me."

"Still-"

"No, Kimberly." A quavering sigh. As my beloved friend turns, I am confronted by a gaze wrenchingly ancient; consumed with a grief and misery transcending her years, it threatens to raise a horrid, acid mist of tears into my eyes anew. "No. I'm sorry, but I cannot endure that. It... I do not understand what had happened, but seeing you and Miss _Shego_, I..." Dark eyes retreat beneath pale and quivering lids, enormous eyelashes dampened with an excruciating moisture. "Even a kiss is more than I can bear, Kimberly. It is not your fault; you are not to blame for falling in love, and I cannot even begin to imagine what has become of you. But, you cannot expect me to be happy for you more than this; I cannot stand by your side as your friend and pretend that all life is wonderful and perfect for the joy that you have found."

"I'm sorry, Ariadne." A harsh, hot, and woeful whisper; my gaze flickering to Xi Go, I discover that she can offer me merely the mildest of smiles, sloe gaze consumed with a guilty grief. "I am so sorry; I cannot even begin to tell you how-"

"Why, Kimberly?" She interrupts with a fierce and blazing intensity. "Why would you apologize? Why would you hurt me more with this?"

"I don't-"

"You should understand, Kimberly. This is the worst hell I have ever suffered, and yet you're apologizing for the love that has created it. I... I know that it must be difficult to understand, but it should be obvious; do not apologize for this love, and do not regret it. If it must cause me so much pain, then I expect that you should live your lives without shame and reserve; it would be a waste of my tears, an affront to them, if you were to be sorrowful for that." And she does weep; sorrowful, gleaming beads of molten torment, an angel's grief that thunders in silent cascades across her cheeks.

"I love you, Ariadne."

"I am glad for you and Miss _Shego_, Kimberly; what you have is... Is something that only those in love could understand. It makes me as happy to see you together, to know that you are so overjoyed, as it crushes me, Kimberly; I do not dissemble. I would not lie about that. I wouldn't be sobbing like this if- if..." A harsh and dreadful sniffle. "If I were only angry, if I were only consumed by this envy that will never be relieved."

"What will you do, Ariadne?"

"I... I don't know." A whisper of ingenuous misery. "I do not know, Kimberly; perhaps there is nothing left for me. I... I have no worthwhile education; I have not even a maiden's chastity to call my own. I do not desire a husband, and I am too tarnished for marriage, in any event."

"You..." A nightmare epiphany strikes me, and I find myself beside her at once, my fingers fastening with a renewed strength upon one slender, fine wrist. "Please, do not."

"Why, Kimberly? Why? Is it because you don't want the guilt of..." Raising unseeing eyes to the towering ceiling, my friend seems to implore the universe for an answer; she finally speaks when it seems as if one will never emerge from the divine. "You have no need for guilt; you have no need to grieve for me, Kimberly. You should have a clear conscience."

"Don't be stupid, Ariadne; please. Please, don't be stupid."

"I am seventeen years of age, Kimberly; I have already suffered more misery than anyone should. What do I have left?"

"Your life; the friendship and love of two that care so much for you."

"And whom I cannot bear to see. No, I think-"

"Do not be so foolish, or so short-sighted."

"Kimberly-"

"We have fought and killed for you, Ariadne; we have struggled, and... And I am covered in blood; my hands are awash in it, as is my soul, even if it had been for our own protection. And, now you tell me that none of that matters?"

"I will die free; that is what matters to me. I will die happy."

"Don't be an idiot." I, at long last, can no longer restrain my anger; those words emerge as a harsh, rending snarl, raking across my raw and tortured throat. "Don't be so stupid. What do you wish for me to say, Ariadne? Oh, please, take your life so that you won't need to think about _Shego_ and me being together, being happy! Is that what you want to hear from me, Ariadne?" I browbeat her as I never have, as I never would have envisioned, with an anger surpassing anything that has ever claimed me in its furious grasp. It is not a warrior's rage; it is a hysterical, fulminating passion, a womanly and overwhelming and awful, knotting anger that churns within my stomach, that raises horrible, fearful prickles of tears into my eyes.

"What do you want to hear from me, Ariadne? Tell me. Be- be that selfish, and I'll obey you without a second thought. You've taken that knife, haven't you?" I know that she has; its luster glares through my soul, some terrible and pernicious asp prepared to claim a life that has so recently been saved.

"Kimberly-"

"No!" I interrupt a low and plaintive moan. "Tell me. Tell me straight to my face that you want to kill yourself, that you want to bury that evil man's knife in your throat like a martyr to our love; anoint it with your blood." I wail in Russian, no longer able to contain myself. I realize that, once before, I had screamed at Ariadne in this fashion; I understand, at long last, for what reason her rejection that had writhed through my breast with a seething electric torment, and why she would have been so cruel. She feared for her soul, and for mine; now, she fears for being a burden, and I feel virtually as if I could kill her for that pernicious, selfish parody of altruism.

"Isn't that what you would ask of me, Ariadne? Damn it, why won't you just tell me that, if it's so important?" I cannot flush at my obscenities; I cannot feel shame at this howling, histrionic madness. I cannot bear to suffer this loss; for Ariadne to quit me now, following so much anguish, would be the most terrible blow I have ever suffered without feeling as if I would vanish from Xi Go's embrace.

Claiming the blade from her grasp, I feel its heft, the solid, sleek chill of the terrible metal against my palm; it is a serpent's fang, bloodied and monstrous upon my skin. The grip whispers with a subdued malevolence as it turns of its own accord; the blade finds her throat, hovering upon an ashen and yielding canvas to be reddened in sacrifice.

"Just tell me, Ariadne, and I will take your life for you." My heart thunders in my chest, my soul screaming for this madness to end; for her to come to her senses, to rage at me, to shriek in mortal and unfathomable terror at the fulminating insanity of this awful, sanguine dragon's fury.

She weeps; not with betrayal, but with an agony of terror and doubt and suffering that has mounted for years. Still, rigid, quivering with the enormous awfulness of this monstrous embrace, her eyes swim with a molten haze of raw torment. Rouged lips trembling, she nevertheless cannot muster a single word.

"Ariadne! Damn it, tell me what you want! Do you want to die? Do you want to live? What do you want? I won't let you leave me on your own terms; just as before, I will never, ever let you say goodbye." I, too, am sobbing; much like that afternoon, voice convulsed with a directionless and grief-stricken anger, staining her fine silken gown with my tears as I buried my face upon her shoulder, refusing to release her. I astounded myself with my strength that day, a brief flicker of that warrior's fury consuming me.

She had vowed that we could no longer be friends, that some secret I would never understand would sunder us; that it would be best if we were to be separated. I could not abide such a notion, such silliness, such fatuous and inarticulate folly. I was never assertive before that day, and never again, but I would not allow Ariadne to leave me. Even now, as I know that the love I feel will never be of that hot and savage and craving passion that devours me with Xi Go, I will not permit it to seep through my fingers as if some elusive mist.

"Tell me!" Again, I scream; without restraint, I howl and bay as if a demon.

"Kimberly." Finally, Ariadne speaks; her voice rings with a sudden and resounding clarity, even as this mad and rolling, heaving bewilderment swims around me. It feels as if reality has been set into a shuddering and impossible, jarring motion, drifting and rocking as though a tempest-tossed clipper, with the anguished emotions flooding through me. "Kimberly. I love you."

"I love you." Lips shivering, jaw straining, my eyes overflowing with harsh and savage tears, I pray to everything that this is not the natural flow of this life. "I love you."

"I will not leave you. Not- not in spirit, Kimberly." At those words, her gaze alighting with a radiance that truly awes me, my hand relaxes; a desultory clamor is all that announces the passage of the blade from my grasp, and I throw myself into her arms, my own devouring her.

"You are so stupid, Ariadne. You are such an idiot. You- you shouldn't terrify your friend like that." Though it is not the embrace that she craves, my lips nevertheless fasten upon her cheek, again and again, a rain of gentle and chaste kisses upon shivering skin dampened with a sickly and chilled sweat.

"I... I could say the same to you." Her answer seems nearly wry, even through wailing sobs of sudden and extraordinary absolution.

"I'm sorry." I... I was prepared to kill my friend, to kill Ariadne; to murder with a hot and angry agony my sister, a woman that occupies such a powerful place in a soul that is also of Kimberly Dmitriovna. "I'm sorry."

"Do not be. I- I was foolish. I... I could just think of nothing but that pain, that it all might be for nothing."

"You will live, Ariadne. You will live. I promise you that."

"I... I will. But, I cannot bear to be with you and Miss _Shego_. I'm sorry. Not now, in any event." I do understand; it does not pain me perhaps as intensely as I had feared. "You and your beautiful wife have lives of your own to live." Merely the vaguest, unsteadiest suggestion of a tormented smile.

"What will you do, then, Ariadne?"

"I do not know." A sullen and uncertain shake of her head, fine auburn locks whispering across her shoulders. "I don't know."

"I can help you, Ariadne." And Xi Go materializes beside us.

"W-what do you mean?" She stiffens in my arms, her gaze flickering between Xi Go and me.

"Here." And, at once, with that marvelous and impossible prestidigitation, bereft of any trace of a magician's fanciful techniques of conjuration, there swells a mountain of bills beside my love; whispering heaps of paper that bear in their curious, hollow faces a value for which so much has been ruined. "I... I know that it is so very little, but... As foolish and pathetic as it is, one must have money to survive."

"That..." Sorrowful chestnut pools cloud with a conflicted swell of truly palpable emotion. "That is so kind of you, Miss _Shego_. I... I do not know what to say." A deep and quivering breath. "I hate this dreadful, filthy money, but I do know that it is needed."

"It is yours; every pound, Ariadne." Beside it, conjured from the ether, is a trunk; stout leather, it springs open at a gentle breath as though in the throes of a pummeling hurricane, the bulging heap streaming into its infinitely capacious bowels. "It is a tiny shard of the magic that you will find for yourself; I know this." My love speaks those words with a solemnity that raises a renewed flood of tears before my sight.

"This is farewell, isn't it?" Those words are my own; a sudden and wrenching epiphany that forces me, once again, into Ariadne's arms.

"Only for awhile, Kimberly. Don't- don't be so silly." A lingering embrace, savoring, once again, that familiar and yet so very singular, distant warmth; it is not that sensual, seething love, but it bears with it the whisper of quiet and beauteous nights amid the porcelain chill of winter, praying and pleading for a future that had yet to arrive.

I realize only that we have parted when a curtain of awful and scalding mist reveals a beloved friend retreating into the distant darkness, her voice resounding through an eternity that I hope will see me through until our next meeting.

"We'll meet again, Kimberly. Invite me to your wedding. I will always love you."

"I love you, Ariadne!" I cry out, the love that defines me claiming my hand as the love that once had vanishes from sight.


	15. Azure

The quiet, sullen murmur of _Xianju_ is a soothing serenade amidst this solemn silence, the delicate warmth of Xi Go's arms enveloping me in a wondrously patient and tender embrace. Ariadne truly has vanished, yet again; and yet the tears that seep in continued, acid trickles from my eyes are not of sorrow. We have liberated her from a fate more terrible and dreadful than death itself; one that rendered, in those aching and torturous moments, that darkness a comforting release within the all-enveloping, cruel wings of a sorrow more awful and complete than anything I could ever aspire to envision.

Despite that, however, I held her as I once had, even as those emotions had shifted irrevocably and unalterably away from that familiar, molten yearning; a tenderness, complete and singular, stained with a glorious and ascendent love washed across us in a moment of absolution. It bore a quiet whisper of change, of transformation, and yet those tearful murmurs were not those of such unutterable grief. I do love Ariadne; it is a love that I acknowledge without reserve, that I embrace without compunction, for it is a love of pure, natural grace and splendor.

I love Xi Go; that love, engulfed within the soft, yielding perfection of my lover's arms, nestled against the soothing palpitations of a heart that throbs and wails with an adoration solely for me, is one that defies any hope of description. It is a perfecting sublimity, a completion in human form that delivers me from the cringing, tortured perdition of an insufferable desolation in her absence; it is a love that joins our souls utterly and inseparably, that unites us with a golden splendor of flawless radiance. It is a love, I realize with a knowledge that transcends any earthly wisdom, that defies time and distance, that is as indestructible as heaven's own jade.

"I love you." I have whispered this again and again, a mantra of irrepressible intensity.

"And I love you, My Kimberly." A reply that never falters in its giddy and rapturous delight, eternally consumed with a manic jubilance that writhes and shivers with truly palpable waves of emerald rapture. My eyes no longer must even strain to perceive that liquid magnificence, perennially engulfed by that lovely and beauteous inundation even more readily than they gaze upon the supernatural exoticism of my beloved's incomparable, glamorous splendor. "I love you so much."

"I... I know that it must have been difficult for you, _Shego_." While a once aching, raw, and nightmarish blaze of fear has diminished to little more than the frailest of embers, that anxious heat continues to prickle at the very fabric of my soul at what has transpired. My reunion with Ariadne, the realization that the love that I had felt has remained, however altered, has merely reaffirmed how complete and untarnished the devotion that consumes Xi Go and me has become, or always has been; and yet I shiver with an unutterable and inarticulate terror at the notion of it inspiring some awful, tortured jealousy within the heart of my beloved.

"Kimberly?" While those thoughts and emotions flicker as readily as an angel's whisper across that tremulous jade nexus, she nevertheless commands my explanation for the nebulous jumble of clashing and winding notions that flit through me.

"_Shego_, I... I know that you must think me terrible for forcing-"

"Forcing me, Kimberly?" The mildest quirk of a smile upon dark lips, rouge long since vanished amid a furious and desperate rain of kisses. "You did not force me, my Love; not by any means."

"Were you not jealous?" It is not a vain and narcissistic plea for some silly indulgence of a lover's game; I truly fear that she had been, however patently ridiculous that seems from this height of secure and all-consuming love.

"No." Despite her protest, I confront a vaguely guilty wisp of a frown that blossoms with almost agonizing trepidation across full lips. "I... Perhaps a bit, on some level, with the thought that you had once loved Ariadne so strongly; that you still may." An almost abashed whisper, as if my beloved believes that such a thought should never even have been permitted purchase upon the wondrous and untarnished magnificence of her mind.

"You know that I do not love her as I do you, _Shego_; I could never." That affirmation lunges forth with an almost manic intensity, a fierce and molten longing to reassure her, to comfort her in a moment of even the minutest doubt or insecurity. Nestled upon the firm and unfaltering warmth of my lover's lap, my arms fastened around the lovely and willowy grace of a slender and swanlike neck, I feel as if we are again reenacting the Madonna's embrace, even as I am the one to soothe her in a moment of subdued torment.

"Ariadne... She is, and will eternally be, my friend; and I adored her once with a passion that I no longer feel, as you had Meilan." It is not a comparison of malice or vindictiveness; that anxious, tormented heat that her name had once invoked has cooled to a bitter ash, no longer even of hatred. She had scorned a woman more glorious than the gods, and had inherited mere banality; she was never deserving of a shred of that affection. Ariadne had never been willing to embrace our love for fear, and it had tumbled from her grasp. What both of us have discovered from those losses, from that ephemeral grief, has been more sublime and beautiful than could ever be imagined.

"Even learning now that she loved me so strongly then, as she loves me now, does not stir the slightest twinge of regret within me; and I'm certain that you can feel that as powerfully as I do." My love must; it roars through this nexus with a desperate, frantic intensity that renders any other thoughts merely the mildest of sibilant whispers. "I could never regret that; even then, what I felt was..." My brows knit with a grinding frustration, until I realize why words elude me. "I cannot describe it; it is comparing the ocean and the sky, so different that it's just not possible. The love that I feel for you, _Shego_, is ageless and timeless and absolutely transcendental. I love you.

"You... I am yours, _Shego_; I am yours, your slave, your love, everything that you could possibly desire. My life would be forfeit without you; my soul would be nothing but a burden without your embrace." That soul pours forth in an irrepressible, luminous tide; a gleaming torrent of starlight splendor, purer and more focused than the sun's light beyond the reach of this world, beyond the grasp of anything so banal and insipid. It gleams with a fierce diamond luster, engulfing us in a haze of radiant bliss that threatens to rob me of breath that I need no longer even draw.

I am crying again; weeping with a resplendent and triumphant joy that I hope blazes through her so ferociously as it does my own heart; I bind myself to her with that liquid delight, tears of unimaginable ecstasy that buoy my soul further and further, lofting it to glorious heights.

"I love you so much, _Shego_. I would be more than lost without you; I simply would not be. My... My heart could no longer beat; my lungs could no longer draw breath; my eyes could no longer see. I would not be anything without you. I..." And I sob and sob at my eternal betrayal of her own adoration, of that hideous capitulation beneath Death's unflinching grip. "I do not know how you live without me."

"It is not life, Kimberly; it's meaningless. But, every moment is only waiting for you to return to me, to love you more and more."

"That... I love you so much, _Shego_; that you are willing to wait for me every time, that you... That you love me so much..." Lucidity escapes me; even through this wondrous gossamer thread, my emotions flare and shudder with such volatile, quaking intensity that I fear it's little more than an indecipherable babel.

"I do love you, Kimberly. And... Even with that jealousy, there was never any doubt. I... I was not part of your life then; I can't very well be upset about that." An almost comic quirking of her lips amid this hot and smoldering haze. "Perhaps I felt a bit left out."

"I wish that you'd been with us then. I- I would have fallen in love with you in an instant as my instructor."

"I fear that it would have seemed a bit inappropriate, My Kimberly."

"I wouldn't have cared. W-what does appropriateness mean? I only want to be with you, to be yours." Startlingly, wondrously, even _Xianju_ radiates an almost transcendental joy at our embrace; even that peculiar and immortal chariot seems to perceive the molten adoration and devotion that throbs between us, that flows in wondrous, magical streams of liquid beauty, emerald streaked with scarlet melding with some impossible iridescent splendor. Jealous as she may be, _Xianju_ knows, as must everyone, how completely and utterly I belong to Xi Go, and she to me; that I gape in perennial awe at her beauty, as she is entranced by my modest and girlish aesthetic.

"You would not have minded the scandal, my Love?" A wondrous nuzzle of fragrant cheeks that seems intended to tease me away from any thought of parting, of turmoil.

"What scandal? I... I know now that what I had seen between so many girls, and a few of the instructors, was hardly innocent." Secret embraces, tender and forbidden kisses huddled in dark corners; the caress of hands in languid and gasping repose that seemed somehow indescribably natural to me.

"Even at such a young age?"

"I would have known that you were my love in an instant, as you knew that I was. I... I told you, _Shego_," a reflection upon that first, breathless glimpse of her radiant and supernatural beauty, of that divine aura that seemed virtually to still my heart even as it sent it thundering with an irrepressible fury within my breast, "That I fell in love with you the instant that my eyes fell upon you. I- I was awestruck; I was overcome. You were so beautiful that it made my heart ache; it made my entire body feel as if it had come alive as it never before had. I needed to spend every moment of every day with you; I even thought and dreamt about you that night, and every night thereafter."

There is no reply to that but a tensing of powerful arms to an almost excruciating pressure, crushing me into her fragrant and majestic warmth that has not been tainted or tattered in the slightest by the fury of battle that now recedes into distant and dark memory. A quiet whimpering, and the gentle hitching of breath within the lovely softness of her chest is more intense, more resoundingly passionate, than any words.

"You dreamt of me, Kimberly?" She finally whispers, as if a shy and torturously timid girl; as I had been, as she perhaps once had.

"Yes. Constantly. These... These beautiful images," even now, my cheeks redden with any reflection upon those wondrous, gasping glimpses of a rapture deeper than could ever be envisioned, "These thoughts and feelings and... And that release." I realize that I've never mentioned that to her; that such an agonizingly timid murmur could never have even dared to emerge from lips still virtually paralyzed. "I never knew that I could feel anything so powerful, so passionate; it frightened me. I..." I wish, however, desperately and with an almost frantic, throbbing intensity, that I had conjured that maniac will to kiss her sooner; that I had been so convulsed by that need, by that soaring and transcendental knowledge of the complete perfection, the utter rightness, of our union that I should capture her.

"I wish that I had not been so timid, even if I believed that it were for your sake, My Kimberly; it was foolish. I... I just thought that it would all be so foreign, and frightening; and you..." The luminous glory of her smile does not vanish, however dampened it becomes by a dreadful thought that I feel resounding through our shared destiny, "You have perhaps not always been so accepting of that. Sometimes, you have been a bit frightened, or unwilling to consider the notion, even as you knew it to be true."

"It was still perfectly foolish of you to force a frightened girl to confess to you, _Shego_." A rather feeble effort at petulance that I can sustain for but a brief, flickering instant. "I... I just wish that you had told me much sooner."

"You would have believed me?"

"Yes." Immediately and unhesitatingly, without the slightest shred of restraint or doubt, as I had the instant that my beloved finally elucidated that glorious and eternal destiny. "I... Even with Ariadne, even with some fantastic and unachievable conception of a future that I knew we would never have together, I still felt incomplete, as if some answer would always elude me." That musing seems to eternally seal away what lingered of those yammering doubts, even reduced to little more than a pitiful whisper of uncertainty about that peculiar and seemingly fantastical existence as Kimberly Dmitriovna.

"Perhaps I would have even been happy, but I could never have felt what I do with you; because my soul knows that I belong with you, that it is true and pure and perfect that we should be intertwined like this. I exist only for you, and that knowledge has always been with me. I've... I've just felt so miserably empty and incomplete; and, without even Ariadne, who comforted me, even if it was not with the love that we share, I was certain that I would fade away into nothingness.

"It was an ordeal to just remain awake, to remain alive, in that sullen loneliness, charting every day by the droning of some pompous governess who thought nothing of me and believed in nothing positive or uplifting. I... I literally fell asleep with my eyes open, just looking at the sun and wondering when it would dip beneath the bristling leaves of this huge tree beside my window; and, even then, it was merely so that I could sit through some joyless and lonely meal, and fall asleep so that I could expect that again the next day.

"I... I should have soared with joy to discover that we were traveling to Shanghai; and, perhaps some shred of Bao Li's soul did scream with a joy that I no longer even understood. I thought that it was fear, but I think that any emotion then was nearly that; anything stronger than apathy, or a quiet and noncommittal solemnity, was terrifying, just because it could rupture that shell that I'd allowed to collect around myself and place all of that misery in such incredible relief.

"I've... I've just felt so odd since we drifted into the harbor. It feels as if my life truly started then; that, in one blinking instant while I listened to my mother try to teach me English, I was born. Even with the enduring memories of my childhood before that, it's as if that was some seminal instant that brought me alive anew; and, seeing you, I felt as though what I had lost returned to me in a beautiful and blazing second.

"I... I knew that I was alive then; this terrible and extraordinary and unbelievable boil of emotions just flooded through me the instant that my eyes fell upon you. You were so beautiful; so wild and incredible and pulsing with this power that I was amazed that absolutely no one else saw. I... I thought that they were blind, or ignoring it; that it must have been so obvious that you were just alight with this energy that filled me, that made me absolutely drunk with this indescribable need.

"Every day after that, I just wanted to hold you; I was so excited for you to teach me, even if I felt as if I didn't understand anything that you said because I could only listen to your voice that serenaded, that serenades me, like a melody that no man could ever create. I love you so much, _Shego_." A deep, desperate gasp of breath as the sudden epiphany that I have been speaking virtually without pause strikes me with a molten and flaring urgency. "I needed to kiss you then; I couldn't bear it any longer. It felt as if I were denying the truth, rejecting a reality that was so beautiful that it would be sinful to ignore it any longer. I... Something guided me to you, and I could only embrace you."

"I love you, Kimberly." Magnificently, my beloved is consumed by tears that freely course in immense, sluicing floods across elegant and creamy curves. "You... You truly felt that?"

"My life was not worth living without you; I think that I stayed alive only because of some wisdom, some higher and wondrous knowledge, that we would eventually find one another."

"That is why I have endured, Kimberly; even when those endless, eternal silences felt as if they would devour me, I remembered your voice... The many voices with which you have serenaded me in tributes to our love; your whispers; your screams; even your sobs with every beauteous revelation, and with every disappointment." Xi Go's voice dips to a mere murmur, even as it seems to thunder as a roaring and resonant shout, reverberating throughout every reach of my very soul. Tears mingle into a pool of angelic crystal upon our joined skin; deep and raw, ragged pants swell between us, a furious and gasping harmony that seems to lift that resounding joy and rending heartbreak to impossible crescendo.

"The voice that you speak now, as always, is my favorite. I... I do not live in the past, Kimberly, no matter how much it must have seemed as if I thought nothing of that first love; and, yet, I only can, because of the perseverance of your spirit. That- that is why I cannot be envious, or upset with anything from your life, because I embrace it as you. It... It is so odd, so difficult to explain why it feels natural again and again to meet you in so many different bodies, speaking to me in so many voices.

"But, Kimberly, that is why it is so beautiful; because there is no explanation. You- you, again and again, are always beautiful; you are always the most glorious creature in all of creation, and you always behold me as if I, in my plainness, am a goddess." I feel as if our minds have been reversed; it bewilders me that she would adore me as such a glorious and transcendental beauty, for I have never seen anything so extraordinary in myself. And, yet, I am magnificent in her arms.

"I sometimes wonder if our pact with the gods is almost foolishly unnecessary, if we have simply been made for one another; carved together from one stone, eternally united by a bond more powerful than anything."

"I do, _Shego_." I earnestly do; this jade union must be more powerful than anything that we alone have wrought, even with the strength of our love. "I... I have stopped believing in a god that I realize might never have held my faith, but my belief hasn't waned in a certainty that there must be something so great and glorious as to bring us together, as to allow us to exist together. I could never find a name for it; I don't believe that it would ever allow it. I love you. I... I was always afraid of being ignorant, but I understand now that certain knowledge can never truly be known; that it can only be felt, glimpsed in flickers by the heart."

"We have never before said this, Kimberly, and yet I know that we have felt it." A kiss; a kiss as if we never have savored that embrace, even as our lips blaze together with an intuitive and gloriously natural grace. There is no fear, no distance, no trepidation; unlike our true first kiss, I do not dread some inevitable, terrible rejection; much like that wondrous and singular caress, however, a blistering tidal torrent of electric delight sears through me, washing through every reach of my being, claiming my very soul, as if to drown me in a joy beyond joys.

There is nothing but this extraordinary, thundering silence without, and a tranquil and sublime inner roar that seems impossibly serene cascading between us; emotions cry out in a soulful and brilliant harmony, a song of hearts in complete convergence. A tremendous crescendo of a single voice, it feels as if that peculiar, awkward fugue has become a true, sonorous perfection; no longer does any gap, any divide, exist between us. If we were to merge into one, to become a single, complete entity of love, I would feel no loss; perhaps I crave that, the instant and blissful transcendence of a physical distance that seems almost torturous amid the union of souls.

"I love you, My Kimberly. You... I want nothing but to spend the rest of this boundless life with you; I would say that I wanted to grow older with you, but I want only to exist as we do now, in this now." Those are my thoughts, as well. A peculiar, quirking periphery of my mind wonders if, someday, even two women might have a family; that we might have a vast and beautiful menagerie of our own, nestled within some radiant and verdant meadow, encircled by eternally blossoming flowers.

"We'll be married soon, won't we, _Shego_?"

"Yes, Kimberly."

"Where?"

"Where?" My love seems curiously bemused by that question. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I... Will it be with a Taoist temple again? Will we be united in that, as we always have?"

"I don't know." An earnestly thoughtful murmur. "I don't truly know."

"Why?"

"China is changing; everything seems to be different. I... I didn't realize how much it had, sincerely, until today; even a..." She seems to dread reflecting upon the miserable events of this evening, and yet nonetheless persists. "Even that vile man, that superstitious fool, seemed not to recognize an immortal; he deigned not to accord us the respect that we were deserved, even when we revealed ourselves. It is not as if China was always a land of grandeur and unyielding virtue, but the crude and vulgar fixation upon nothing but something so loathsome as money, and by society's most powerful, affirms for me that it is not as it had been.

"Everyone... Everything, I suppose, is becoming..."

"I know. It's becoming more European; that doesn't upset me, _Shego_."

"It wouldn't; I know that."

"My parents were an embarrassment, _Shego_; that dreadful and repulsive fashion in which they behaved toward you, particularly my mother." That terrible affront remains as such an extraordinarily raw, throbbing scar upon my very soul; the notion of my mother, in her boundless and repellent, judgmental egoism, her Europhilia, deriding the very culture and character of a woman that even then instilled me with a soaring and inarticulate adoration. "She's- she's an appalling fool; the worst of everything that I once just took for granted as 'proper and upstanding', no matter how disgusting it seemed."

"Your mother is fine, Kimberly." A ripple of utter astonishment writhes through me at the bewilderingly conciliatory and understanding tone that suffuses my beloved's tender voice as she speaks that.

"But, I-"

"I understand why your mother is as she is, Kimberly; it is not her fault. Those..." A gentle and pensive smile creases full and dark lips. "Those thoughts are not even her own; that malice is as brittle and artificial as a facade of candied glass." An amusing image that nevertheless, in its sheer crypticness, does not resolve my perplexity; those dulcet tones, those knowing words, seem to accentuate that, for the age of my soul, my understanding is nonetheless that of a young woman, barely blossoming into adulthood.

"What do you mean?"

"Your mother... Not a great deal, perhaps nothing, is under her control; it is much simpler to hate, to scorn, to deride, than it is to accept that. She is angry and hurt, and people that she has never met, that she need never meet, are easier targets for her frustration than what is actually bothering her."

"I... I don't understand." At that, I'm greeted with a smile that would be positively infuriating were it not of such beauteous and understanding patience.

"I know, my Love; I know. Perhaps... Perhaps it is not my place to explain this."

"What do you mean? I... I know that my family has become peculiar," 'peculiar' would seem perhaps inordinately mild in light of the concentrated madness that I have beheld in recent weeks, "But what would upset my mother so terribly? Why- why would she be so angry with you, in par-" And it strikes me with the suddenness and ferocity of a wayward locomotive hurtling from its rails; it thunders through me with a roaring fury, my mind derailed with this abrupt and terrible epiphany that seems to wrench the luminous and rather baffled grin from my lips in a single stroke.

"Kimberly?"

"I..." Images of Reinhardt's family, of his father's roving eyes and dubious devotion, stream in irrepressible torrents through my mind; my mother's anxiety in the presence of so beautiful a woman as Xi Go, her dreadful behavior toward Maria and Valentina in full feminine blossom, despite her own beauty...

"Kimberly, is anything the matter?"

"I..." Is this another violent shattering of the vestiges of childhood delusions and innocence? Is this the explosion of some lingering artifact of naïvete upon the unyielding, stony brutality of reality joined by the tones of my low and whimpering keen? Is this the sound of betrayal discovered?

"Kimberly?"

"Does... Does my father not love my mother, _Shego_?"

"W-whatever are you talking about, Kimberly?" Not a gleefully insincere and patronizing question to a child, but rather an adult's awkward evasiveness. "What brought about that?"

"I... I just thought of what you said; that it isn't your place to explain why my mother would seem so aggravated with you."

"Kimberly, I don't know-"

"But, you suspect? Is- is it how he looked at you?"

"If every man were unfaithful for glancing at a beautiful woman, then I'm quite afraid that marriage would be a long-dead institution." An almost wry murmur, though it's alloyed with a certain dark and dreadful solemnity. "Have you not noticed how beautiful women are, as well?"

"None are as wondrous as you, _Shego_." I protest; and it is true. Even a being of truly supernatural origins, _Xianju_, in her most intensely perfect and beauteous form, cannot compare with her.

"But, have you?"

"I suppose that I have." A singularly guilty, heated whisper, a terrible and blazing flush unfurling across my cheek in vermillion blossom. "Is... Isn't that beside the point, though?

"Why are you asking me this now, my Love?"

"It just occurred to me. She... She must not trust my father very much."

"They had been apart for a year." A low mutter.

"W-what does that matter?" I truly don't understand; a year or a century, how could one stray from a fierce and all-consuming devotion that transcends time and distance? Not once could I suspect that Xi Go would be untrue to me; the grief that has devoured her, that roils through me at the slightest revisitation of that unfathomable nightmare of separation, affirms that her thoughts have been of nothing but conjuring the wherewithal to even remain alive amid that unendurable isolation and torment.

"Nothing, if you can trust your lover." An affirmation of the utmost sincerity, and one that hardly satisfies me.

"Are... Are men different, _Shego_?" I've often pondered that; increasingly, my mind has lingered upon those fundamental distinctions. Not merely the crudeness, the squared and coarse awkwardness of the male form, destitute of the sleek and sinuous grace and beauty of a woman; of cumbersome hands and harsh features; of bristling hair and obtuse muscle where there exists solely lovely and soft elegance upon a woman. Rather, reflecting upon the awful and bewildering misery that seems to befall so many, men and women alike, of frailty and retiring gentleness, in a world by and of men, my mind has increasingly dwelt upon the sense that there must be something fundamentally awry with that masculine power; that there nearly lies some essential corruption at its core, rending away gentleness and love in pursuit of raw, crass gain and indulgence, even when it is merely in pursuit of even the frailest ghost of what that beautiful and pure, feminine loveliness permits.

"What do you mean?" I relish that she does not mock me, however playfully; that she does not behave as if I have announced a point of supreme obviousness.

"It's..." Xi Go's torment has been in a world of men, in a society that, much like my own, like every that I have witnessed, has considered women little more than children in pleasant bodies. "I feel as if men think so much differently than women do, that there is something so deeply and irreconcilably different that we might just be different races entirely. I... I always felt near to my father when I was younger, when I was a little girl; now, as..." As a woman, though the blush of embarrassment at even pondering that seems to accentuate how little a woman I actually am, "Now, he does not even notice me.

"And, hearing of Reinhardt's dreadful father, seeing that monstrous place in which... In which so much cruelty was visited upon Ariadne for the pleasure of vile and awful men, I have this sense that there must be so many who are without souls, or who are so different from anything that I know as human that they must live according to a different rhythm." I finally, lamely, conclude, barely capturing the slightest shred of the vast and confusing jumble of thoughts that drift in nebulous constellations through my mind. And perhaps that is another point entirely; the rigidity and regimentation of mankind, of such acute and insufferable, stultifying intensity that it seems as if lingering, aesthetic grace is beyond the toiling and tireless industry of what is vaunted and civilized.

They even ridicule those that would bestow upon the world great art and enlightenment in their dawdling contemplation of beauty and refinement; they, those 'civilized' beings of my mother's cast, heap scorn upon scorn upon those that would cultivate the mind, rather than burgeon a nation's steel output.

"Not all men are like this, Kimberly." A distinctly neutral sentiment that does not instill me with the utmost encouragement. "What of Reinhardt? Isn't it obvious how deeply he loves Jacqueline, how he is willing to be without responsibility for anything but her? Can you imagine his love straying from her for the briefest of moments?"

"No." And it is my most desperate hope that, for my mother's irritability, my father is of Reinhardt's unfaltering devotion; that she is merely neurotic, tormented by a gap of time and distance. The certainty that I would be but a tortured, confused sea of roiling panic in Xi Go's absence for even a week seems to accentuate that all the further.

"Why are you concerned about this so suddenly?"

"It's..." A wondrous and tenderly encouraging smile greets a desperately pensive and anxious nibbling at my lips, suddenly taut and strained. "It's everything, _Shego_. I... I've just the sense that virtually the whole of the life that I've lived before this has been a lie; a ridiculous and feeble, childish delusion that's now just shattering with all of these revelations. Everyone- everyone has just lied to me, even if they believed that they were being kind, or..." Or even preserving my soul. "Even Ariadne had lied to me.

"Now, with you, I've had nothing but the truth; you haven't sought to shield me from anything, and you've comforted me, ushered me through unbelievable darkness that raises this joy into even greater relief. I suppose that, seeing... Seeing how ugly, and how truly beautiful, life can be, rather than one gray and terrible, bland monotone of an artificial childhood, I've begun to think about so much as I never could have. I lacked the words, even the ideas, to question it; now, it just seems so bewildering, and I wonder if I'm terribly delusional, or if I'm finally beginning to glimpse the truth."

Rather than an answer, the magnificent, unhurried, and achingly tender caress of full and warm lips upon my own devours my senses with an almost wanton languor. She kisses me, and kisses me, as if welcoming me in the most blissful and delicious manner possible to the dark and turbid waters of adulthood; but, clasped in her arms, her love and adoration, unfaltering and wondrous constants more resilient than diamond, I am buoyed above that churning uncertainty.

"_Shego_?" I nevertheless confront her with an expectant whisper as we part; a beauteous breathlessness settling upon me, that word, that glorious incantation of unwaveringly perfect love, consumed with a deep huskiness.

"I do not know what to tell you, My Kimberly." And, again, she does not dissemble; a brutal and unflinching sincerity that is as cruelly uncertain as it is so magnificently, sublimely compassionate in its ingenuousness. "I sincerely do not. Even... Even if your soul is so ancient, even if you are imbued with wisdom transcending mortal knowledge, you are only seventeen; you are becoming a woman otherwise, even if you are in my arms, and have been for centuries." A pensive beat. "Life is very difficult, and very confusing; it's complicated in a way that is maddening for even the wisest of philosophers. Living in a cave or immersed in its full and riotous unpredictability, one can nevertheless not even aspire to grasp it in its insanity.

"I think that we are truly mad creatures; you will never seen an eagle struggling to ponder the nature of the universe, or dogs killing one another for the right answer to a question no one has ever quite asked." A quiet and slightly incredulous, airy giggle. "I think that's why we're so remarkable, as well; why we can be part of the _Tao_ while apart wholly from it; that we can love, and live, with such intensity and insanity."

"I... I suppose."

"A part of love is being insane." And she affirms that in the most wondrous manner possible with a vast, goggling grin that is as rife with cheek as it is utterly, beautifully demented.

"I think that you're right." And I capture her lips again in a kiss of wild, perhaps mad, abandon; I devour her with a renewed and frenetic intensity, seeming to submerge the whole of my doubts and misgivings beneath that blazing pool of raw, roiling and volcanic ecstasy.

Even _Xianju_ seems to accommodate us; a beauteous gleam of the moon at its fullest apex, unimpeded by the seething and oppressive glower of the city's vast banks of artificial luminosity, virtually the furious blaze of a malign and diseased vermillion sun at eternal dusk, seeps through her magical windows; portals to the divine, they seem to harvest the very purest essence of the night sky, that glorious quicksilver orb casting a singular radiance upon us.

So powerful is its presence that I'm certain the gentlest of strokes of my hand could claim a shard of that shimmering magnificence; raking through gauzy and resplendent, vibrant platinum as if the most delicate of clouds, to deliver to my beauty as a gift still barely befitting her supernatural radiance.

"_Xianju_ must know that I am yours, _Shego_." She and I are awash in that celestial majesty; her sublime, creamy flesh nevertheless preserves its own unique and supreme luster, even as it glimmers with a curious reflection of that divinity.

"Yes." An agreement of the utmost certitude, powerful and delicate arms lacing around me. "Yes, she does."

"Is she jealous, _Shego_?" The mildest of giggles; perhaps it is of the utmost and appalling vanity, but the notion of such a creature's envy is uniquely lovely, doubly so that she would channel such adoration into such wondrous ambiance.

"You are so very vain, My Kimberly, as you always are." A sigh of exaggerated exasperation. "She is; rather, I should say that _Xianju_ is most envious; she adores you, as she always has. She craves always those of extraordinary beauty, so it is only natural that she would yearn for you." A rather pointed pause. "To no avail."

"Indeed." _Xianju_'s grumbling, in complaint or simply for the preservation of that thoroughly silly pretension of normality, suddenly halts; it plunges us into an unearthly silence, isolated wholly from reality even as it should begin to seep into this mystic serenity.

"We've arrived, it would seem." And the moon vanishes; or, rather, it dips to but the most delicate glimmers upon a suddenly distant horizon, the writhing dragon's scales of our walls swelling forth to claim a once uninterrupted span of tranquil ebon.

"I suppose so." Despite the events of this evening, however, despite the overpowering affirmation of that the wondrous and magical, natural beauty of the garden eclipses the sullied, cruel evil of the city in its sublimity, I do not quite desire for it to end. Taking Xi Go again in my arms, I simply submerge myself in her warmth; burying myself against the fragrant, swanlike majesty of her throat, I devour her wholly with every sense; awash in her scent, singular and more beauteous than I could envision, consumed by her warmth, savoring the creamy softness of her unblemished skin beneath my lips, I'm certain that I could remain for all eternity.

"Kimberly..." A serenade of the most wondrous of sighs, occasionally ruptured in its sibilant loveliness by quiet, keening whimpers and coos. "I love you so much."

"As I love you, My _Shego_." She is mine; unwaveringly, unfailingly mine, and I consume her with a fierce jealousy beyond the intensity that _Xianju_ could ever aspire to muster. Only when the harsh, bleating belch of a horn resounds throughout this once unbroken stillness, the savage incandescence of headlamps lancing through the wilted and supernatural darkness, do I part from her, beholding a sight that jars me in its unaccountable oddity.

Within the pooling, golden glower of a blazing light that ripples through the penumbra, it seems as if the figures that ease through the recessed gate are illuminated by a virtually theatrical spotlight; they appear to stride with an easy and languid casualness through that void, unperturbed by the savage glare that sears with nearly supernatural intensity into my vision. As if characters upon a stage, my father and another woman materialize; he is, as always, eternally recognizable in his almost melodramatic enormity, doubly so as he shelters within the rustling folds of a familiar and stout greatcoat. It has endured as a staple of a distant and gauzy childhood; the anchor of such a vast and nebulous constellation of memories that seem virtually to orbit that resilient shroud of sublime, rich fabric. Of a raven splendor, imbued with the downy softness of the finest sable, and trimmed with a gilded brilliance, it seemed nearly more massive than that towering, gentle giant of my remembrance; the yearning to don its sheer immensity was overwhelming, and yet that aspiration so often eluded me.

Even when he allowed it to settle upon my narrow shoulders, alighting with a roaring and bearlike thundering of laughter, it seemed as if its magic had been sapped away into the ether; or that, perhaps, my father, papa, was the origin of that luminous sense of brilliance, that such a singular and exotic curtain of warmth was merely a channel for some supreme and transcendental paternal energy. I loved him; deeply and fiercely, perhaps as all girls adore their fathers, it was an abiding fantasy that we would be married. Then, obviously, amidst that peculiar and fragile, magical daze of early childhood, the merest inkling of what adult love is wholly escaped me; ponies and unicorns and other hopelessly mortifying, mystic icons of that surreal romance were more immediate and urgent than the teasing and glorious and wanton and blazing, molten delight that I savor when enfolded so wholly within Xi Go's sheltering embrace.

Now, glimpsing the gilded and almost flamboyant richness of that garment, I realize how tattered and feeble a magic it has become; it glares with a savage radiance that hardly is of the lustrous flourish that I can recall, even upon the darkest of evenings or the most luminous of White Nights. They lurk in wait, seemingly frozen in a brief flicker of an instant that a cruel divinity is prolonging into an eternity, beside a stout saloon that I'm certain is that which had borne us originally to this wondrous and serene garden menagerie. An enormous, fur-draped arm at once rises with almost careless, languid gentleness upon the fine and slender curves of his companion's shoulder; suddenly, with the most effortlessly graceful rolling of her lithe and willowy body, a stout braid flashes through that seething incandescent blur that at once becomes little more than a haze of misting tears.

The realization that my eyes have yet to fall closed in a single soothing blink momentarily obliterates that spectacle; and yet it endures, returning to clarity, as a cruel tension shudders within my clenching jaws. Xi Go remains silent beside me; the growing pressure of her slim and powerful arm around my waist, however, struggling to soothe me with a glorious and transcendental heat that permeates even this icy bewilderment, affirms that she is not blind to what is transpiring.

They are... They are hopelessly brazen; and yet, flickering through that darkness, is a gray void from my father. There is seemingly no emotion, no sense, no humanity whatsoever; no trace of grief or guilt or rage or anger or even a throbbing, irrepressible joy; even at the capturing of his partner's familiar, full lips in a shameless kiss, a predatory and vulgar grasping of a frail and defenseless animal in an eagle's talons. His lover, however, blazes with an aura that stuns me with its truly terrifying enormity, and I know at once whom this beauty that he embraces with such cruel and bestial lust is.

A seething azure fire unfolds from her shapely silhouette as if a blue inferno; terrible, reaching limbs of liquid flame scour across my sight, creeping through the very fabric of reality as if to lance into my gaze, to blind me with their awful, writhing cruelty and evil. They're cold, an arctic inhumanity that shivers with an immensity of emptiness; a molten, swimming void that looses horrific, inarticulate shudders of raw terror through me. There is no trace of warmth, of love, of anything approaching a familiar and joyous humanity; not even a raw, screaming and angry madness that I had confronted within the hearts of so many tormented by the awful, bestial depredations of Shanghai.

This... This eclipses even Du in its debasement; it can only be evil. A pure, distilled evil, as if drawn from the fruit of some malign flower sprouting from hell's own soils; it smiles with a soulless and vicious mirth, an icy and empty glee that seems to offer nothing but perdition; arms of shimmering darkness, so black, so terrible and dreadful and vicious in their senseless and focused animosity toward all, that it is truly the absence of light. There lies nothing within this aura that is Maria, I realize; and what crawls, with a deliberate and ghoulish, insectine malevolence, through my very soul eclipses fear as if a raven moon.

"_Shego_..." A desperate and fervent mantra, invoking the name of the divine, of my goddess, that sheltering and all-embracing warmth amidst this sudden and overpowering chill. As Chang, that dreadful and pernicious, toadying abettor, that traitor, parts one of the massive saloon's steel doors, my father, with an unaccountably vulgar gentility, aiding Maria into its lurid, swimming shadow, she turns; even nestled within the folds of a supernatural darkness, _Xianju_ having evaporated from any corporeal plane, eyes that my own sight registers as a dreadful and impenetrable ebon fall upon us.

Jolting against Xi Go with a convulsive spate of terror, I'm certain that she grins; a smile, truly diabolical, no semblance of anything resembling joy flitting through dark oceans more inscrutable than the moon's black face, parts lips rouged with obscene scarlet radiance. She continues to smile; Maria snarls at me with that monstrous parody of mirth; a baring of fangs with a mocking joviality, slender fingers fastening with an almost proprietary fierceness upon my own father's hand.

"_Shego_... _Shego_..." My body quakes as if the earth itself in its final moments; limbs once steeled in savage battle have become shuddering liquid wretches, unable to maintain a grasp upon the merest poise; teeth chatter together as if the stilted cadence of a Maxim Gun; sight teared with this endless, unblinking enrapturement blazes in a fit of unimaginable, rending fear.

"Kimberly, it's..." It isn't 'all right'; it isn't fine; it isn't anything even remotely approaching that. Above even that dreadful and abhorrent kiss, beyond anything that could be feeble-mindedly explained away with infantile rationales of gentle paternal intimacy; beyond even my father's dreadful and ghastly, gray, withered emptiness, there is that unutterable, evil presence that has displaced the warmth and tenderness that defined a maid, a sister, that I adored with a blazing and fierce love. She frightens me; beyond disgust, beyond a raw and severe, raging illness that washed over me at Du's pernicious presence, there is a bestial void of humanity that now throbs from her, that smiles with a malevolent glee.

"_Shego_, what is happening?" They, at last, depart; and yet, seeming to torment me, to taunt me with its all-enveloping enormity, the saloon has become awash in a brutal aquamarine flame; flickering motes continue to drift through the darkness as if diseased butterflies, smoldering and seething with a joyful malice that raises an irrepressible and irresistible scream from lips that quaver with unreasoning terror.

"Kimberly! Kimberly!" I can no longer even wail with those baffling and inarticulate fear; I realize that I never actually had, that those savage tidal currents of wrenching horror had smothered even those frantic shouts, drowned within my throat with an anguish that I now know to be the rending, bloodied aftermath of my childhood's final annihilation. An apocalypse in azure-streaked vermillion, Maria's gleeful icy cruelty embracing the hot, raw and ragged streams of my warbling grief and torment in a forceful dance into infernal depths.

"Kimberly, I..."

"_Shego_..." I am sobbing; again, as always, clasped in the sheltering wings of an angelic presence, I weep, scream, wail, and falter, swimming liquid anguish pouring from within me with every streaming curtain of tears that rises and falls anew at each wracking and tormented, hitching gasp and whimper.

_Xianju_ is respectfully silent, but I sense that even that curious supernatural chariot shudders in the presence of anything of such transcendental awfulness; I've even a peculiar and prickling certainty that our seats heave with a brief and miserable tremor of a fear that lances even into her inhuman heart.

"Kimberly, I'm so sorry." A dreadful, dull, and leaden apology, as if weighted with a magnitude of grief so thunderously immense that it eclipses even my own. "I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault." Whose fault is it? What is even the fault amid this nightmare? Is it my father? Is it that pernicious and unforgivable, feeble-minded fickleness? Is it my mother, for having been so inattentive and permissive? Is it... Is it Maria? Is this her retribution against me? Is this malice that uncoils with serpentine savagery her hate for me, for some incomprehensible slight?

"I'm sorry." Again, my beloved apologizes with a hot and angry misery. "I'm so sorry."

"For what?"

"For..." A woeful and pregnant silence that confirms my direst of fears; and that, though I feel no distance between Xi Go and me, this awful and dreadful fissure between my father and me, between Kimberly Dmitriovna and Kimberly, lunges open into an unbridgeable divide.

"Do not apologize." That whisper erupts as a sibilant and agonizing swell of steam that boils from the very depths of my soul; as if a ruptured boiler, seething and scalding, it roils throughout every reach of my body as a hot and angry, creeping monster of amorphous misery.

"I'm sorry, Kimberly."

"I... I do not blame you; you were protecting me."

"He..." What is she to say to me?

"Did you know? From- from the very beginning?"

"Yes." Another jarring blow that chips not from the statuesque and towering magnificence of Xi Go's integrity, of her beauteous perfection, but from that crumbling facade of paternal majesty that once had captured in its faltering patina the image of my father.

"He... How did you know?"

"Kimberly, this isn't-"

"I do want to know." I will not compromise upon this; even if it is the epitome of foolishness, even if it will grant real and terrible and throbbing, livid, living form to every fear, every sickly and creeping doubt and suspicion, I must know.

"Why does it-"

"Why does it matter?" So rarely have I interrupted her, and yet my words vault forth in irrepressible agitation, forced from my lips by that manic and furious steam.

"Yes, Kimberly. Isn't- isn't knowing this enough?"

"No." A mournful and pathetic whimper. "No, it's not. I... I need to know what has happened; I need to break those remaining few illusions of my childhood, of being Kimberly Dmitriovna. They'll- they'll just torture me until they vanish." They feel as if the few remaining silvered shards of a shattered mirror, lingering with steadfast and stubborn perseverance within the frame, even as they simply taunt with a cruel and warped facsimile of a reflection that no longer exists and will never again be.

"He tried to seduce me when I arrived." A low and sullen admission, emerging as a piteous and unaccountably ashamed ghost of a whisper. My gaze, once captured by the lingering, ghastly traces of that terrible blue fire that trailed in Maria's wake, now returns to my beloved; to its true, right, and just anchorage upon beauteous features now contorted with a woeful and excruciating grief that wrenches my heart with a savage cruelty. Full and glorious lips tremble, tensed with a straining anxiety that I do not understand in its palpable and fulminating enormity; enormous sloe oceans seem to burgeon impossibly with a glittering and tormented veneer of tears.

"_Shego_-"

"I should have told you. I... I suppose that I should have, anyway; I had not even devoted the slightest shred of thought to it. We- we were destined to be together, so I simply tolerated his struggle to turn lead into gold." That raises merely the vaguest, most hopelessly ephemeral quirk of a smile upon our lips. It is an impossible alchemy; as it would be for me, such an endeavor would be beyond any man's persuasive powers.

"Did..."

"He was polite, and gentlemanly, but he was very insistent. I- I did not even realize that he had a wife; I was virtually as astonished by Annette's," not once have my love's lips caressed my mother's name, now so foreign and surreal in its distant, gray woefulness, "Arrival as she was by my own. I... I can understand why she should despise and distrust me."

"That is what you meant."

"I... I'm sorry, Kimberly." And, yet, she had not lied to me; perhaps she had misled me for my own sake, with those deliberately cryptic and ambiguous answers that could reveal not even the slightest shred of truth even as they would seem to elucidate universes of information.

"He didn't-"

"No. Never. He... He would not be the sort to force himself upon anyone, and I cannot envision his doing so with me."

"He looked at you with..." With such ugly and terrible, naked lust, I realize; as if he apprehended her pure, raw, and almost poetic beauty, and yet was blind to the wondrous and infinitely greater, throbbing majesty of spirit that boils in truly tangible waves of emerald magnificence from my love. "Even in my presence, it was as if he desired you."

"I am certain that he did, Kimberly." Finally, she does not dissemble; there is no deception, no effort at that skillful mental sleight-of-hand, to guide my thoughts with the utmost, languid and tactful grace from so miserable a topic.

"Why?"

"Men..." A shuddering and uneasy breath. "You have seen that; not all are as devoted and consumed with love as Reinhardt; and, even when they are, not all can contain passions that they feel compelled to embrace."

"That's..." That's absolutely ludicrous; it is as if she is explaining men as another species entirely, some sensuous and irrational beast of wantonness that cannot even be blamed for its animal wanderings. Even... Even wolves, even ducks, love and devote themselves to their partners; year after year, I recall, a beauteous and vivid pair would nest amidst a lush and beauteous pond, eternally rearing young to which they attended with a lovely tenderness and dedication. "That sounds so stupid."

"Women, too, can be fickle and fragile in their affections." And she is right, I am certain; Meilan was as committed as my father, or perhaps even less so, of such insensitive and indifferent, cavalier stupidity that she subjected my beloved to a fate more miserable than mere death without even the briefest of thoughts. The literature that I have read is rife with torturous portrayals of cruel and heartless women, though I've the increasing sense that men's own guilty fears are being foisted upon those wicked seductresses.

"I... I still do not understand. I love you, _Shego_; I live for you." My very heart beats for her; my soul's endurance is wholly, unyieldingly for her. "How... How could anyone- anyone in love feel any differently?"

"I do not know." Another wholly, unflinchingly severe answer that agonizingly resolves nothing for me. "I do not know, My Kimberly. But... There- there is nothing that can be done."

"Does my mother know?" Those tortured words vault from my lips as if a nightmare incantation. For weeks I have stewarded this terrible image of her as some bestial and vicious tyrant, preying upon Maria and Valentina with a wanton cruelty for her own amusement; and while I cannot yet even feign the remotest understanding of this, her grief and misery and sheer alienation are suddenly so powerfully and terribly understandable.

"Annette?" So rarely have I confronted my mother's name. "I... I do not know; but she must harbor fears."

"I feel terrible for her."

"Do... Do not reveal anything to her, Kimberly." A stern and sudden warning that seems of virtually heartless severity.

"W-what do you mean? My mother... Even, even if she has been truly dreadful toward us, she does not deserve this unhappiness." However excruciating such a woeful confirmation of those seething and indescribable fears would be. "She... She should not just cling to these suspicions; she should not need to fear those awful and creeping phantasms."

"Should they be given form? Should... Should she know-"

"Perhaps she already does."

"Would you desire to humiliate her with this?"

"No." I can muster the merest of fragile, pitiful whispers in reply. "But, why should she be humiliated?" That thought wells from the very depths of my mind with a frantic and blazing aggravation. "Even... Even if she is positively terrible toward Valentina and... And Maria," I cringe at the thought that it may be with cause that she torments Maria so cruelly. "Even if she acts so horrendously toward them, or to me, or to you, why is it that she should be humiliated by this? Isn't it my father's fault? Isn't that his crime? She has done nothing; she has not been unfaithful to him."

"I do not know." My love's voice is a sullen nadir of woe. "I do not know, Kimberly; that is simply as it is."

"Is- is she to be blamed for my father's wretched dalliances?"

"She would still be helpless; she would still be without recourse, and without any means of seeking redress for that. She would need to see him every day, and still perform..." A pensive and solemn pause is more illuminating than any explanation, and yet she continues. "She would still need to perform her wifely duties for him. She would need to- to think about all of that."

"Does she not already?"

"I do not know."

"Haven't you ever spoken with her?"

"Your mother thinks of me as a whore, Kimberly." And, at once, I am torn between a raging, fulminating fury; a bristling and animal hatred for the woman that had given birth to me, and a sense of almost unutterable sorrow and pity for her delusion. "She has no words for me that you have not yet heard."

"W-why would she believe that?"

"I am another woman, Kimberly, and she transparently does not trust your father." With abundant cause, a particularly harsh and bitter shard of my mind rues.

"I... I suppose that I understand, but I still don't understand why you haven't simply told her that... That you are not; that you have no interest whatsoever in him." I finally conclude, my voice a brittle and tentative whisper. "I wish that we could simply tell her of our love; that our spirits are intertwined in an eternal union that nothing could ever rupture. That- that we belong with one another; that it is truly, wondrously fated."

"As do I." A murmur that begins as a solemn dirge, rising to a glorious and singular, soaring crescendo of utter elation. "Kimberly, we will forever be together; no matter what, regardless of what we confront, we are destined; we are fated to be intertwined as we are. I love you so much. I- I hope that you know that absolutely nothing could ever come between us."

"I would never allow that." A severe and earnest vow, even as my lips finally part in a smile that I feel has yearned for liberation from this crushing, tortured weight of utter grief and bewilderment for what seems ages; shearing through the now brittle stone of that sorrow, it swells to a gleaming pinnacle as that wondrous certainty overtakes me again with the thundering force of a tidal current, sweeping along every reach of my mind with the liquid splendor of that knowledge. "_Shego_, even if you were to flee me, I would never allow you to escape. I'm... I'm no longer the terrified and neurotic girl that could barely conjure the will to kiss you; I'm becoming an immortal as you are, and I've no intention of ever being away from you.

"We've... We've seventeen years of separation to make up for, haven't we?"

"Far more than seventeen, my Love." And, again, passionately, but with an unhurried and glorious languor, she kisses me; amid a smoldering embrace of positively swollen, blazing rapture, she kisses me as if we never have savored that intoxicating, molten splendor that rushes through every reach of my body in a gilded tide of liquid bliss. She kisses me, devours me, as if compensating for every instant that we have been parted throughout those excruciating and unendurable separations; for every instant that we were forced to vibrate to another measure, even as our voices sought out one another with such aching desperation, to again unite in that sonorous harmony.

That cruel metronome of fate has stilled; no longer do our destinies flicker to and fro, united and divided, joined and sundered; we exist here, together, claiming one another with a fierce and unrestrained intensity that renders me breathless, lungs screaming for that perfumed indulgence even as I cannot endure a single instant without her embrace. My worries, I realize at once, are trivial; surrendering to that glorious, singular, beauteous selfishness, it strikes me as a sublime and resounding epiphany. Despite the unremitting anguish that it may bear; despite how brutally it may have shattered what remained of the brittle heart and soul of Kimberly Dmitriovna, I no longer exist alone, whimpering and feeble, amidst that sullen darkness; no longer must I be forced to struggle in her stead, pleading for a divine revelation that will finally relieve an aching void that has vanished.

I love Xi Go; she has completed me, fulfilled me; our love, our embrace, has mended the frayed and tattered wretch that I now know truly to be my soul. So powerful, so achingly and overpoweringly intense, is this joy that suffuses me, that devours me, that I am virtually overcome by a pain that I had never realized existed. It was the anguish of separation, of a distance so torturously immense and unfathomable that it had simply numbed me in the enormity of its cruel grip.

And I surrender wholly to her; swollen surges of that bliss well above the cringing revelation of that grief, more acute and overwhelming than it ever has been. This evening has seemingly been of interminable epiphany, secrets and lies stripped away to expose the awful and singular truths that have eluded me in my foolish and oblivious childhood.

And, yet, in those truths, in those woeful and miserable discoveries, this soul has attained a deeper completion; the dark pall that had lain upon those forbidden and inaccessible facets of Kimberly, of Kimberly Dmitriovna, of Bao Li, of the countless other souls that have joined in this sublime chorus has been, at long last, drawn away with the most delicate of silken whispers that thunders with an almost divine intensity. The tiniest, the feeblest, of words resounds as if a scream; and those momentous, raging events of fulminating emotional immensity seem earthquakes; but everything is drowned, smothered, reduced to little more than the frailest of gasps amid a hurricane by the raw and overpowering certainty of our love.

"I love you, _Shego_." A harsh, panting whimper, as if I have never before spoken those words; they electrify me as they never have, even amidst exquisite heights of incomparable passion, as though I have discovered even deeper and more wondrous profundity in them. "I love you. I love you. We... We never will be parted; promise me this, my Love. Please."

"I promise you again and again with every kiss, Kimberly. The day is approaching very swiftly; soon, so soon, so soon," a wondrous and beauteous cooing of that word that nevertheless tortures with its teasing distance, "So soon, Kimberly, there will be no obstacles between us. Centuries will seem as trivial as seconds."

"Seconds are not trivial, _Shego_." They are not; a gasping, cringing awareness of the impermanence of this life, of every instant opening the gap between us by those infinitesimal, creeping hair's breadths, overtakes me as it never before has. It is as if I have not merely been reborn, but elevated; every sense screams with a heightened awareness, as if the tiniest sparrow's breath would roar with a typhoon's wrath.

"I know, My Kimberly; but they, too, will be. We can slumber for a year if you wish; we can make love for a decade without pause, if you so desire." An image that raises a swollen welter of vermillion across my cheeks, even as it ignites, with blistering and urgent immensity, a throbbing yearning within my heart.

"Only a decade, _Shego_?" That emerges as a low, rumbling purr; an almost dangerous, razored shard of pure lust, seething with a molten and overwhelming need.

"I fear that you'll be the death of me, My Kimberly, even as an immortal." Despite how awful those words, I cannot but join her in a low, delirious laugh.

"Then I'll need to be gentle, won't I?"

"Have mercy upon an old woman, my Love." As if she would upon a young one; the fury with which she claims me, with which her hands fall upon my bare arms, is exquisite, slender and delicate fingers as if writhing, liquid steel upon my skin in their fierce, almost frantic grip.

"No." Breathless gasps between relentless, ferocious kisses. "No."

"I'm glad." My love favors me with a wondrously, entrancingly dark and sultry murmur that seems to shriek along every nerve, igniting a blaze that no longer can be resisted with even the fiercest of struggles. "I'm so glad."

"_Shego_, should..."

"Should?"

"Should we really be doing this here. It..." It seems somehow indecent, embracing with such ferocious, writhing passion within the folds of such a singular, living chariot. "I'd rather be in our room."

"As would I." And, with a bizarre, blinking sense of displacement, we find ourselves nestled in one another's embrace beyond this sublime and charmed cabin, the prickling chill of the evening air washing across my bare arms even as Xi Go's warmth consumes me with a full, complete magnificence that such an insipid discomfort could never aspire to pierce. Swallowed by that susurrating blackness, caressed by a languorous and careless gust that flutters with a graceful loveliness through my beloved's vast, inky mane, I feel as if within another world.

Winter, finally, has receded in the face of a glorious and unparalleled spring; balmy, soothing breezes of paradisaical magnificence filter from heaven itself, reducing to nurturing ambrosiac perfection those tortured snows that had once shrouded the fertile soil from which a love beyond love sprouts. I feel it blossoming as a searing flower of jade perfection; fine tendrils ease through every reach of my soul, of my heart and mind and body, claiming me. The damp, fragrant delight borne upon that electric wind exhilarates me; distant lightning seems to scour through me with the caress of the transcendental, awakening me wholly to the full, sensuous constellation of pleasures and joys beyond what I could ever have envisioned while mired in that dead, arctic desolation.

Swept into my love's arms, it is as if I've been claimed by a tornado of living emotion; our joined hearts, that singular union, that love that writhes and shivers and screams and wails and weeps with an ecstasy that soars ever higher... They take flight as we do, pressed aloft without even the slightest effort, shrugging away the prosaic grip of a reality that has lost any sense of definition and truth. What I once knew to be certain, to be an unequivocal, unyieldingly firm perfection of wisdom, is but a lie; what had been lies, what had been impossible, backward untruths with which my mother harangued and tormented me are a beauteous and luminous delight that defies those simplistic and banal notions.

This love, this joy and delight and soaring, aching, tearful rapture... It defies duty; it transcends responsibility and gentle, retiring ladylike reserve; it swells above toil and suffering and those unremitting, yammering demands that one must give first of oneself, that one should never, ever expect a joy that should be so freely granted to others. It defies the misery of restraint; it shatters with iron hands and a jubilant smile an anchor that once threatened to plunge my soul into the most inescapable, black waters of ordinariness, of a life of simple obedience, of joyless and loveless propriety, eternally wondering if ever I might find happiness. Of praying, day after day, pleading and begging and beseeching some distant and deaf father whose hand had long since fallen from my shoulders for an answer to questions for which I had yet to even find the words; to resolve the aching yearning within my soul that could never be soothed with the balms of obligation and selflessness.

This love, indeed, is as deeply selfish and glorious as it is selfless; it is a relentlessly indulgent joy, intoxicating in its blissful immensity, even as it is an ecstasy that exists solely to flatter, to inspire, to caress, to ignite those wondrous and tumultuous, uncontrollable emotions within the breast of my love. We exist as one; that devotion, that commitment, that mad and uncontrollable, irresistible conviction could only be selfish, for we are but one mind and one heart and one soul between two bodies, joined in an eternal striving pursuit of a day that cruel distance will finally be closed.

And, yet, I cannot bear for us to be joined as one quite yet when this seething, writhing rapture sweeps across me in her embrace; she devours me as we soar, taking flight through a sky damp with the beauteous and majestic promise of rain; pregnant with an electricity that shivers through me, crackling along my skin as if ever fine prickle of moisture is an arcing flash of lightning. My thundering heart supplies that rolling percussion, a kettledrum enormity that renders the distant toll of those deep roars but the frailest of beats.

It feels again as if this ascent is eternal; while I perceive nothing but her beauty, in such wondrous relief beneath the quicksilver magnificence of the moon, illuminated by her own grandeur, I feel as if I behold the world itself. The certainty that we are spanning the globe with every fluid and easy instant, bridging lands and oceans with each breath, is overwhelming; and, even when we land, her heels silently finding a balcony that is as familiar to me as my love's creamy softness, it is as though we have never descended. We remain aloft, buoyed even when standing upon a robust wood; even as our clothing silently tumbles away, a second skin shed to bare the true, luminous perfection that lies beneath its gossamer, supernatural magnificence, not once do I feel as if we have dipped from that sublime apex.

We graze the moon with every yearning kiss, every questing caress; every desperate, breathless gasp; every wondrous, sweet, resounding giggle that swells to a scream captured, consumed, by hungry lips. Every new and glorious crest lifts us further and further into a sky alight with the blazing enormity of our love; rocking, swaying, pitching, heaving, every shared breath, every touch, bears us ever further toward a zenith that dwarfs its predecessor.

I realize, in this moment, that I am finally touching what has lain beyond a torturously impenetrable gossamer curtain; magnificent and forbidden knowledge that exists for but my delight, my enlightenment, spills forth as if a fragrant spring breeze. It bears upon its sweet and soft winds a delicious fragrance that is my love; manifest in tones of jasmine and some exotic and foreign fruit, it seems almost melodic in its wondrous and overpowering, irresistible delicacy.

In Xi Go's arms, I am raised aloft further and further to heights never before attainable. I weep as I never have as we kiss, consumed by a joy that sends indescribable and unaccountable floods of that dewy rain along my cheeks; even as she devours them with a delicate and soothing relish, our bodies swaying together as our souls dance, they course forth anew. I touch heaven, at long last, and continue to soar; I brush through the obscuring clouds and confront nothing but infinite horizons that sprawl into something more than endless.

Branches of a divine tree graze along my skin, as soft and lovely as my beloved's flesh; full, luscious fruit, overripe and pleading for my touch, beckon me, imploring my grasp. And, at last, I do; the harvest of those impossible and ethereal orchards tumbles into my hands. She loves me; she loves me, caresses me, kisses me, lifting me further and further as greedy fingers take hold, finally, of what has eluded them.

It is a flicker, a glorious taste of immortality, but it is of a divine sweetness; a soft, supple ripeness that inundates me with a gasping, breathless ecstasy. Xi Go worships me in this moment; she sobs with me in indescribable absolution, in gratitude to all that exists in this life eternal for the rapture that now settles upon us.

And, quaking, shivering, crying out to the heavens that we eclipse with every bounding jolt into a new and wondrous dimension of love, we fall to earth together again; my lips gleam with that forbidden splendor, hands guiltily awash in a nectar that should never grace mortal man; my eyes swim with tears of unfathomable bliss, beyond all.

It is, I realize, not back to the humble star of water and earth that we fall; not to the Middle Kingdom; not to an accursed land of men and fear. We remain above its benighted surface, above its petty and cruel turmoils, above all that would grasp us with a gravity that could nevertheless be batted away in an instant. We cannot even speak; as desperately as my lips work, as fervently as my mouth struggles to form words that seem so meaningless, so paltry, so bereft of substance, nothing will emerge. Those fragile parodies of these incomparable, blazing emotions, these streams of wisdom that thunder and roar with a perfect truth that mere language is hopeless to capture... Those wretched, flawed shackles of a deeper and more complete voice fall dead in my throat, unable to emerge in the presence of anything so glorious.

Again, and perhaps for the first time, we speak without encumbrance through our jade union.

"I love you." Every thought seems to scream this; as if a golden aura that halos everything with a sublime and unparalleled, uneclipsed magnificence, that tribute to our adoration, consumes all.

"I love you."

"We... We're near, aren't we, _Shego_?" A relief unimaginable sweeps through me at that my thoughts, that Kimberly, the wretched being that Xi Go has salvaged, has enlightened, has perfected with her love, endures; that she remains my _Shego_, that such a once mortifying and altogether magnificent appropriation of a hallowed name, a divine name, can endure through this elevation to transcendence.

"Yes, My Kimberly." She weeps through that bond; they are tears of bliss, of rapture, of soaring delight that I have never heard and felt with such wrenching power. They are my tears, as well; they are my cries; they are my screams of ecstasy.

"Truly? Truly?" As if a giddy child, even with a soul older than the heavens, I beg a certain affirmation.

"Yes, my Love; yes, My Kimberly; yes, my Eternity." And we are bathed in the moon's purifying glow; beyond the gauzy swirl of the clouds, of even a pure and perfect night of almost prismatic clarity, this is a moon that looms enormous before us. It seems to span a horizon that uncoils into the infinite as searching eyes at once behold its vastness as my beloved's own impossibly limitless presence; and I realize that she is that moon, that platinum star that lies within reach, that outshines every other glistening mote in the sky.

"Yes." A shivering and tearful breath that raises prickling, swollen joy into my heart; it sends it springing through a body that I can barely perceive amidst this rising transcendence, this eclipsing of all that is but flesh and blood. I sing a tearful and rapturous farewell song, a dirge in upraised delight, to those bonds; to the constraints of the frail and flawed that will soon tumble away wholly, to be reforged into perfect perseverance.

"I am so happy, _Shego_. I'm- I'm so happy that I feel as if I am overcome with sadness; the tears will not end, and yet I cannot stop smiling while... While I wail and scream. What- what is this feeling, _Shego_?"

"It is something that only we can experience, Kimberly; it is something that only lovers of the deepest, most powerful bond will ever achieve. Even if we live for but another instant, we will endure for all eternity in one another's arms."

"Truly?" I cannot be sad; even if my heart were no longer to beat, if this flesh were to become dust, I do know that our love would roar through the vast darkness as an intertwined and blazing light.

"Yes, my Love." So happy am I to feel as if a child; so delighted am I to bask in her soothing, sobbing comfort. It is more than completion; it is greater, greater, greater than perfection; greater still than fulfillment, than anything that I ever have felt before.

Impossibly, I have taken my soul in my own hands; seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries... They unfold before me as if the map of this soul's traverse through a life of torment, travail, and final liberation. Xi Go always is there; sometimes as but a ghost, grazing through the gauzy periphery as but a specter; as a luminous and wondrous beacon that lights my path; sometimes, she walks alone, no longer in my arms; I do, as well, oblivious to her guiding warmth.

But, always, I know that she is there; I see her as assuredly as I do the moon; I perceive her in all. A jade stone of impossible luster, she swings before me, urging me forth; and, at once, I realize that I do her. This soul is more ancient than even that of my love; the heavens take shape before me, and grow, and fall, and reform; stones tumble forth, giving form to the men and women of this land, to me... To Bao Li, to an arc of life and history that becomes Kimberly. Paths paved with those countless lives carved of those two souls draw nearer and nearer, and finally converge; and never again does they part. Those stones remain anchored together as if an eternally knotted chain; and while bound by another span that is a cruel fate, jade and jade fall and sway together, embracing and drifting apart anew in a dance that is both tragic and wondrous.

Liquid sorrow and molten joy both pool into one reservoir that forms amongst them; given form so many times, that love cannot but grow with every tear shed, and every smile shared; every terrible cry of parting, and every glorious wail of rapture in reunion.

So near, now, do I feel to sundering that terrible, rusting bond that clings to us as if the diseased vestiges of some evil serpent, its life now ending. It is a piteous and wretched vestige, and it must now be cast away, as it should have ages ago. It must fall away from a thread of most radiant moonlight; it must allow jade to meet jade and become one, melding together without beginning and without end in an eternal embrace that will shake the heavens with its laughter.

"I love you so much, My Kimberly." And her voice chimes with the delicate and lovely tinkle of those stones; so beautiful, so glorious, so perfect.

"We are jade, _Shego_; both of us. I... I have seen it, my Love; I have seen it within my own soul, as surely as I see your face now." As assuredly as her smile, as the warmth and lustrous radiance that spill through me in a rapturous tide.

"Yes, we are, My Kimberly..."

"I even hear the sound of us together."

"_Ling Long_." And it is so perfect; those words, those thoughts, flare through me, as if touching with a tingling and natural, shivering splendor some hidden reserve of knowledge.

"Yes."

"Beautiful and fine, Kimberly; as though two pieces of jade together, swaying and intertwining. Our threads twine closer and closer together; soon, there will be only that sound of eternal union."


	16. Forever

I cannot rest; perhaps I will not, my mind utterly electrified with the looming fruition of this desperate and struggling effort that has spanned an eternity of these weeks, and has tormented this soul with its elusive cruelties throughout generations. Writhing and shivering with a furious intensity, my mind, at long last, is permitted to bask in the singular delight of wakefulness beside my slumbering lover. Xi Go's majestic and supernatural beauty is perhaps even greater as she rests, simply in the exoticism of her features as they lie without even the minutest crease of strain or tension; a singular and complete serenity, an alabaster ocean whose delicate and lovely undulations form the most wholly sublime splendor upon which my eyes have ever fallen.

Ordinarily, I have been the one to drift into the boundless, contented abyss of rest swaddled in her tenderest of embraces, as if a child; braced against the heaving, swollen fullness of her breast, consumed by the security of her beauteous gentleness, slumber has claimed me with an effortless grace, forcing closed weighty lids with an insufferable strain as before if an irresistible tidal current. With the struggle and ordeal of this evening, however, even Xi Go has been exhausted; or perhaps has seized upon this wondrous opportunity with an avidness that suffuses me with equal delight, powerful limbs laced around my shoulders as the glorious and sensuous warmth of her cheek blazes upon the modest rise of my chest. She seems to throb with every fierce palpitation of a heart whose beat resounds between us; a joint, powerful, thundering affirmation of an eternal and inseparable love, a divine bond that ripples along a gossamer thread that remains even with the failure of the weak and temporal.

"I love you so much, My _Shego_." Even consumed by the unyielding grip of sleep, those words, that worship of her sublime and divine name, seep through the veil of darkness; as if vibrating in glimmering, tinkling tones of angelic bells, they pour through her, my hands, in their unworthy frailty, adoring the lustrous majesty of an impossibly vast, downy fall of raven silk.

"I love you." I can but repeat this; the realization that no words beyond anything so perfect, so absolute in its rightness and truth, will rise to my lips is extraordinary and yet bereft of the shattering enormity of the onslaught of epiphanies that have beset me throughout these revelatory days and nights. It is so obvious, so supremely self-evident, that there is no certainty above my love and adoration for Xi Go; it has swollen further and further with every day, every instant, that we have been united; even when sundered so cruelly, separated by a rusting chain that will no longer restrain us in our eternal union, that rapturous devotion can only soar eternally to more impossibly vertiginous heights.

"I love you." For weeks, the fear that I would fail her, that I would disappoint her with my brittle and unalterable mortality, has been so cringingly manifest; every instant has witnessed a welling of that acid and torturous, scouring doubt, that yammering terror that I would lack the strength, or perhaps even the time, to perfect myself. And, yet, amidst these trials, with her patient guidance and the wisdom that seems to coalesce into flawless, diamond clarity from the pool of souls that lies within my heart, I have finally lain my hands upon that delirious and intoxicating fruit of eternality, of immortality.

Even if for but the briefest of instants amid that swollen, blissful pinnacle of rapture in her arms, my fingers clutched it; even with a yielding and fragile grasp, those majestic, overripe jewels of the ineffable, of an essence eclipsing even the Jade Emperor's power and endurance, lay within my hands; my lips tasted an ambrosia that bore in its liquid splendor, however piteously it paled beside the sublimity of my love, the promise of liberation from the unremitting cruelties of this awful, dreadful cycle of life and death.

I realized, in that moment, that it was the very existence of that sun that commands the fickle orbit of the moon; that fierce, raging, but hopelessly ephemeral brilliance the source of his own extinguishing beneath the delicate, feminine caress of her silvered radiance. They are without balance, bereft of union, of harmony; they struggle and clash, and yet never reconcile their unique and beautiful lights; they war and rage and howl in eternal, alternating arcs of violence, and yet have never found one another in their fundamental singularity.

Xi Go and I, I realize, are the moon and sun; dark, graceful, delicate and enigmatic; vermillion and almost manic with emotion and energy; we have drifted together but for those brief, blissful moments of twilight and dawn, intertwining with such cruel brevity before we fall away into our own hopeless, tortured orbits.

No longer, I pledge, will this relentless and wrenching cycle endure; our lives will be as if eternal sunrise until all comes to an end, until a sunset erases this very world from a celestial infinity. And, even then, that sublime, shimmering light will radiate throughout eternity in the stead of a tangible presence.

"How I love you, My _Shego_." She is; for, while her vaunted and glorious and beatific name is Xi Go, or Go Xi, she is My _Shego_. Kimberly, for all that she is as but another echo of a voice crying out through the infinite, is what I am now; in her voice I have worshiped her; with her arms I have embraced, and do embrace, this perfection. "How I love you." Unaccountably, with a sense of near foolishness, tears prickle within my eyes at the sheer sense of liberation; of a weight levered from my emotions with a near finality, as if never again will I be forced to weep. If I desire to cry, to sob, in her arms, then tears will flood as though from a ruptured dam; but never again will this anguish be thrust upon me by the implacable grip of that foul and devious intruder, a ghoulish slash of shadow more terrible than the liquid darkness, that is Death grinning in triumph, even as it must understand how pathetic and ephemeral its victory is.

That vindictive wretch will be sorely disappointed, now; a boisterous, bombastic smile that is not a retiring and ladylike flicker of joy; a screaming, howling pitch that is not the reserved whisper of an upstanding girl of fine breeding. I am Kimberly; never again will I relinquish my grasp upon that name; I love that name, even as I love with a throbbing and fierce adoration those wondrous and glorious women that have borne this soul.

"Forever, _Shego_. Always and forever, my Love." The words with which she has so often soothed me, now echoed with equal exuberance and certainty. The evaporation of fear, of an unreasoning, quaking, inarticulate terror that had convulsed me until that moment of liberation, of epiphany, is more extraordinary than I, with my mere insipid senses, could have realized; in its departure, everything has seemingly acquired a deeper and more powerful definition. Only with its vanishment have I discovered how crushingly awful such wrenching anxiety had been, how it had fallen upon my shoulders with a hammering punishment whose departure soothes me as virtually nothing ever has.

"Always."

"Yes, Kimberly; My Kimberly." My beloved's words do not startle me; however jarring it is to realize that she has lapsed from her slumber, and however powerfully heard a whisper of guilt is at the notion of having awakened her, I can confront that with nothing but a fierce and luminous rapture.

"I love you, _Shego_! I... I can't sleep. I'm... I'm just too terribly excited." And I am; never before have I felt this. Perhaps I should have been consumed with a similar, writhing glee upon discovering that our family would be relocated to Shanghai, that I would soon be tumbling anew into my eternal lover's embrace, but that knowledge had so agonizingly eluded me then; now, with this complete and transcendental knowledge that soars higher, higher than any waking awareness could grasp, I understand what true liberation is.

It is not the taciturn departure from the sensuous and glorious that monks and priests have sought to grasp in a futile rejection of the human. Rather, it is a ferocious devouring of that essence of humanity; it is a greedy and gluttonous and ravenous claiming of the purest and most wondrous, unalloyed essence of what it is to be human. Immortals can be but that magnificent, mad, raging, emotional, ebullient, grieving, and lustful hedonism; a purity of sensual immersion that can be a glorious living paradox as it trembles and sings throughout an endless life.

Seconds are important; those infinitesimal divisions of time, those seemingly feeble and trivial increments... It is in those, perhaps between those swayings of fragile hands, that hearts beat, that tears flow, that fingers find purchase upon the face of god; it is in those pulsing, brief eternities that the endless is actually forged. And, in this moment, I kiss Xi Go; I devour her with an avid, frantic, craving urgency that renders even an immortal breathless; that can divest the great and powerful and glorious _Xiannu_ Xi Go of every semblance of sense. This kiss is magnificent; her lips bear a sweetness beyond the divine nectar that flowed unbidden from transcendental fruit.

Her love, my love, our love... It throbs between us; I taste it upon the full, pliant magnificence that I once approached with such tortured anxiety. Mere weeks ago, weeks that seem limitlessly sprawling eternities, I felt as if entombed within my longing, unable to even discover the words to capture the seething and throbbing yearning that tortured me, that would not release me even as I sought to ignore its wondrous and insistent grasp. It was a knowledge, a hidden and precious and incomparable wisdom, that pleaded for release in her arms; it was a truth that could no longer be shrouded beneath the gauzy mists of an incomplete mind.

It is love.

"I love you." Breathless, those words nevertheless thunder from my lips as if never before spoken. "I love you. We will never be apart; we will never, ever be separated, _Shego_. Never. As you had said."

"Yes, my Love; yes, My Kimberly. Oh, how I love you!" The curious sense of being a particularly adored teddy bear is suddenly overpowering as fierce, sinewy arms, sheathed in the most glorious, feminine softness, crush me upon full and yielding breasts. "I love you!"

"And I love you, _Shego_." I've no doubt that we could bide centuries merely repeating, echoing, that wondrous and blissful mantra.

"Kimberly! Kimberly!" And, yet, as I prepare to tumble into that serene rapture, screaming those tributes to our adoration until my throat cannot bear even the gentlest, grazing whisper of breath, a familiar voice shatters our private calm. "Kimberly! Kimberly! Kimberly!"

"W-what is that?" The unremitting hammer of fists, frail but insistent, upon the elegantly carved portal that separates our paradise of feminine and lovely delights from the woeful misery and banality of an undeserving reality. I've not heard that voice for a virtual eternity, or what seems to be a reasonable facsimile of one, and yet recognition does not elude me.

"Kimberly, please! Please, you must come quickly! With me!" It is Valentina; the certainty that it is one of the twins, this one bereft of Maria's dreadful and vicious aura of liquid azure flame, is complete at the quailing of those Russian words that I somehow barely understand any longer, even as their significance is immediately felt.

"No. Not now." A groan of virtually petulant, childish abandon meanders from the very depths of my soul, from the most aggravated pit of my stomach. "_Shego_, I simply cannot believe this."

"I know." A similarly aggravated muttering. "I know."

"W-what should I do, anyway? It's probably some trivial and idiotic demand of my mother's."

"Isn't it ridiculously late for such a demand?"

"Is it?" Time has become increasingly irrelevant; beyond the extremes of the sun at its rise, zenith, and plunge amidst an ocean of liquid gold and violet, time in its abstract triviality has escaped me. "W-what is the time, anyway?"

"Kimberly! Aren't you there? Aren't you awake? Please, Kimberly! Come quickly! It's- it's your father!"

"What?" That languorous irritability is displaced by a sudden and buoyant swell of alarm; a panic that my conscious mind fiercely renounces as if a monstrous and misshapen, bastard child, even as what lingers of Kimberly Dmitriovna, of her love for her father, cries out with a frantic terror. "_Shego_, I-"

"You should not ignore that, Kimberly." My love counsels with a conflictedness that nevertheless does not stifle the tenderness so powerfully manifest within her lovely and sonorous voice.

"But, I..."

"He is your father."

"Kimberly!" Valentina's desperate quailing has continued to resound through the periphery of my awareness as if the insistent rattle of some irksome, distant thunder.

"Nevertheless, I do not know if I even care, if I should care." I sincerely do not. It's a woeful and grating conundrum, a tortured philosophical and human conflict that rages in almost comically exaggerated time, roaring through centuries that span those intervals of silence in the void of Valentina's panicked screams. "_Shego_, he is a dreadful and terrible man, and I don't know... I don't know if I even care, if he is even deserving of the slightest kernel of pity. If he is dying, or merely injured, why should I care?"

"Because, my Love, he is nevertheless your father." That simplistic, almost ludicrous logic nevertheless jars me with a shuddering intensity; it is perhaps true in the manner that so many other kernels of nonsense are, despite how desperately I wish that they were not. It is also true in the manner that so many other beautiful items of pure absurdity are; that the impossible can be granted tangible form, can be rendered possible, for one's own magical delight.

"Then, come with me." Finally, those words whisper from my lips.

"W-what?" Incredulity would not quite capture the sheer enormity of the universe of bafflement within that single word.

"Come with me, _Shego_." I urge, I plead.

"Kimberly-"

"Do you wish to flee from the truth now, my Love?" A teasing and needling murmur that raises a strikingly momentous scarlet flush upon lovely and flawless skin. "Haven't I been the one to run foolishly from that blissful reality?"

"A-are you certain?"

"Aren't we prepared to leave behind this, _Shego_? To discharge this pretension and live truly, fully, as wives, as _dui shi_, as whatever we may be?"

"You do realize that your family-"

"After this, I have no further obligation to my family, _Shego_." A fierce and almost volcanic roaring of conviction. "If they would scorn us, if they would cast aside their daughter for the love that rages within her; if they would be so childish and stupid as to disdain us for something more beautiful than words can describe, then it is best that I never again see them." However, perhaps, it may pain me; but that duty, that fragile, feeble bond of filial piety, of joy eternally in abeyance, however shallowly beneath a bland and featureless surface, cannot be endured any longer.

If Reinhardt is willing to exist in the throes of poverty for Jacqueline, to discharge an existence of indulgent luxury and comfort and security for the love that screams and howls and wails with an irrepressible passion for the woman that he loves; if even that weak, awkward, frustrated boy can muster such strength, then I would truly be a child for that to be beyond me.

"I am ready for their rejection; just as I, however doubtful it is, am ready for their loving embrace." Perhaps my family's only question will be, 'Why did you not tell us sooner?' Perhaps, too, cattle will rain from the sky. A brief silence, rising above even Valentina's manic screeching, ensues; and I wonder if perhaps this is another moment in which Xi Go's restraint will triumph above her sense, until her lips fall upon mine with a passion that positively electrifies me.

"As I am, Kimberly. I... I will be your wife; I should be with you at every instant. I am prepared for their hate, as well, as I always have been, Kimberly. I love you." A soaring crescendo of raw, throbbing ecstasy rises with those words, spilling through me as if an irrepressible deluge of liquid joy, and I feel as if I am tumbling anew into her arms, even as we lie together.

"Valentina... She'll be startled, won't she?" An image of goggling, inarticulate bewilderment is powerfully manifest, as is perhaps merely a mild and disapproving scowl; I've not even the slightest conception of what to expect from those that had once been such familiar and unwavering constants within a life whose borders extended to the icy glint of a window.

"I do not know." My love replies with sincerest uncertainty; it is impossible to restrain the groan that wells from both of us as, finally, with impossible wherewithal and a savage, quivering strength, her powerful limbs unloosen themselves from their glorious purchase upon pale skin.

"Valentina! Valentina!" Rarely have I heard my own voice rise to such roaring pitches in abstract; it seems hollow, incomplete, without the glorious and melodious accompaniment of Xi Go's wondrous strains.

"Oh, thank god, Kimberly! I- I thought that you hadn't heard me!" Another muffled shout. "Come- come quickly!"

"What is the matter, Valentina?" How valiantly I bind that raging, fulminating aggravation to my breast; what emerges is distilled, measured patience, almost excruciating in its restraint.

"Kimberly! It is your father! M-Maria says that he is unwell, that he needs your attention!" The merest mention of Maria, of that beauty wreathed in blue and evil fire, inspires a hideous and molten shudder that libidinously floods throughout my very being.

"Maria? Where is she?"

"Tending to him!"

"What is the matter with him?"

"I- I don't know!" A whine of acute and insufferable exasperation, as if I have demanded a physician's diagnosis from her. "How am I to know? I- I am not a doctor, Kimberly! Please! Please!"

"We'll join you in a moment." Those words arise as a thoroughly unwitting hurricane of revelation, but I cannot dwell upon them; she will soon discover the truth as that unique and almost supernatural portal parts.

"P-pardon?"

"Be patient, please." Dressing is a swift affair. While hardly with the singular and wondrous relish with which I had eased into it with Xi Go's graceful and delicate guidance, it is nevertheless a supreme delight to be enveloped again by those mystic, luminous and shimmering folds of divine silk that feel beyond merely a second skin. My eyes, no longer troubled by anything so insipid and feeble as the creeping, inky dimness that whorls and swims through this rain-dampened night, inspect every inch of the glorious, glamorous majesty of that lustrous fabric, and yet they cannot perceive even the minutest suggestion of that terrible, blackening evil that had stained it.

"Nothing so beautiful could be tarnished, my Love." Xi Go's voice of liquid gold pours through my senses without restraint, no longer confined to a hushed and anxious whisper in the presence of any interloper. Her words raise a delighted smile upon lips that bare a gleaming ivory swell of ecstasy.

"I'm so glad." Xi Go, bewilderingly, is clad in what seems purest midnight; I discover upon turning to her from my diligent inspection of the dragon's silk that she has not donned anew that familiar and wondrous costume of deep and sensual emerald. Rather, it seems a shimmering sheath woven of the essence of that murky void; simmering striations of raven ripple and tense around contours positively statuesque in their perfection. "_S-Shego_?"

"We did not have the time to dress, my Love." She offers as explanation, even as my sight swims with flickering motes that stream across massive, unblinking pools of raw bewilderment.

"B-but, what is that?"

"You'll discover soon that an immortal can conjure whatever she wishes with magic alone. D-do you like it?" For the briefest of positively torturous instants, Xi Go seems consumed by an insecurity that feels virtually raw in its enormity, as if a girl before her discerning lover of soaring, swollen feminine splendor. It feels as if it is but an echo of my own spirit.

"I- I love it. I absolutely love it." Slickly reflective, it captures what seems invisible and intangible shafts of light that shimmer through another plane; flickering strands of glorious jade ripple and dance along its surface, as if an alien sun filtering through the deepest depths of an exotic ocean. "It's extraordinary." Lovely, sleek and full legs rise upon heels that seem faceted from onyx, propelling her through that sullen darkness that becomes an electric, shimmering haze with the sudden and thundering blaze of lightning through the sky. Massive, seething arcs knife through the black, spiderwebbing with a lazy and careless savagery through a once still penumbra; rain seems to swell with a brutal vengeance in its wake, lashing at once, without a gentle and trickling preamble, with a savage and susurrating hiss upon ancient stone.

The blazing azure glare also illuminates my beloved with an even greater intensity, though it cannot aspire to compare with the pure and wondrous light that emanates from the depths of our shared spirit. Her curious, mystic costume does not waver and shift; black does not alight with a flaring, electric blue, and that swimming jade is unvarying in its luster and radiance.

"That's... That's remarkable." Easing into my own shoes, astounded as always by the facility with which once awful, leaden constraints allow me to negotiate with utter silence the garden of obstacles littering our chambers, I join Xi Go with dread and delight rising in equal, swollen currents through my breast.

It is true, without question, that I care nothing for the ignorance and hatred of my family; for their likely willingness to cast me aside without a single thought for the blissful and glorious love that writhes between us as if a living presence unto itself. Kimberly, the woman, is not Kimberly Dmitriovna, the child; and yet we are nevertheless one, thoughts of that distant, murky haze of childhood filtering into the clarified and beauteous, infinite and unbounded waters of adulthood. Perhaps my terror is but for a fear that no longer strikes me, that could no longer find purchase upon a mind perfected in its focus, its absolute, unwavering devotion to a singular purpose that defines my very life.

Xi Go is my life; she is my heart and soul and my infinity, shimmering with a radiance that eclipses the sun and the moon at zenith in their swollen and full splendor. She is formless and yet complete, perfect majesty given incarnation, a tangible magnificence that nevertheless is but the minutest whisper of the glorious and unparalleled resplendence that lies within a soul that I can feel rushing nearer and nearer toward a complete and inseparable union with my own.

"Are you certain, Kimberly?" There is no doubt, no insecurity, in her words; sonorous and dulcet, that musical glory does not shiver or falter for even the briefest of instants. It is but another opportunity to proclaim my maturity, my progress, my achievement in that march toward completion, and I embrace it with an avid intensity that virtually stuns me with its thundering bombast.

"Yes, _Shego_. Yes; always and forever and again and again and again, I am certain. I love you."

"And I love you." And, with that resounding affirmation of our unfailing union, my hand, unfaltering and untroubled by a chilling weakness that had once divested me of every trace of courage and worth, falls upon the knob.

And the door opens, baring an image of almost unaccountable alienness; no longer does my heart swell with a palpable and all-encompassing adoration at the sight of this creature of almost aching beauty that confronts me. It seems virtually a personification of the gulf that has swollen between Kimberly and Kimberly Dmitriovna; between the immortal, the heir to a soul more ancient than the heavens themselves, weighted and buoyed in equal measure by rapture and anguish indescribable, and the child for whom a glimpse beyond her window seemed a plunge into terrible and unfathomable depths.

Valentina is precisely as I recall, and yet, were it not for those lingering vestiges of childhood memory clawing themselves with a tremulous and gasping struggle from the penumbra that has settled as a liquid cloak across those distant years, that remembrance would not exist; deep, expressive pools fix me with an emotion very much approaching the manic, her features contorted with an anguish that ripples in awful spidering scrawls across supremely fine and unblemished ivory skin. Slender and refined hands, hardly a maid's, worry at a momentous braid that remains a lustrous and sleek band of interwoven silk, clutched before a weighty and full, pendulous bosom that no longer sends tormented, acid pulses of some unutterable and inarticulate emotion through me.

In retrospect, perhaps pathetically, I realize that it was lust; that it was a visceral, animal craving to permit my hands to fall upon that wondrous and lovely fruit; for my lips to taste a nectar that now bears the allure of poison.

"Kimberly! Oh, Kimberly, thank god!" A worshipful quail bubbles from between lips that remain as lovely and elegant in their voluptuousness as remembrance permits; and yet, even as an aura of cool and almost neutral vermillion flares from within a simple and untroubled soul, her features alone instill me with a cruel and unwarranted revulsion. She bears the face of a woman that despises me, that wishes nothing but unimaginable malice upon me. Even if is not of the pernicious, arctic cruelty of Maria, a sense of terrible pettiness sweeps through me, and I realize at once how dreadfully simple it would be to lapse into the unreasoning and directionless hate of a woman such as Reinhardt's mother; perhaps my own.

"Valentina." That acknowledgment trickles from the troubled depths of my spirit, as if dazed from the frantic but lost battle of Kimberly Dmitriovna against Kimberly, the immortal; Kimberly, Xi Go's eternal love, her wife.

"W-why did you not answer me? Were you asleep?" Valentina simpers; no longer is she alight with the radiant and irrepressible, frivolous joy that I can recall, suffusing even the most torturous moments with an extraordinary levity. In her presence, once, even a funeral could be cause for laughter; now, it seems as if she is but a churning ocean of panic.

"Is it that urgent?" How is it possible for me to be so casual, perhaps cavalier? Do I truly now care so little for that dreadful giant that was once my beloved papa?

"M-my god, yes!" As she speaks, Valentina's gaze, goggling and unfocused, sweeps away again and again from me; it is as if she cannot maintain even the briefest focus upon me, as though I am a force more blindingly harsh and terrible than the sun's glowering wrath at midday.

"What is the matter?" Her seeming incapacity to speak anything but that refrain is beginning to wear upon me; that epiphany of seeming callousness accompanies an awareness of how dazed and almost hypnotized she appears, as if but a puppet.

"Your father... He- he isn't well. I don't know anything else; Maria says that he is very sick. He-he's asking for you."

"Maria?" The mention of that dreadful woman threatens to sap every lingering vestige of sympathy for him. "What of my mother?"

"I- I don't know. I've not seen her for some time." Unaccountably, even as Xi Go's slim fingers have interwoven with my own, our embrace very much that of lovers, it appears as if Valentina confronts us with a gaze of utter blindness.

"All right, Valentina." Perhaps I was avidly awaiting an opportunity for defiance, to further, bombastically and fiercely, affirm my independence from tyrannical order and repression. The notion of that those endless eternities of stymied yearning, of silent and ever simmering craving kept from boiling above a dignified shell of politesse and ladylike reserve, being of my own delusional creation is perhaps beyond what I can endure, even now. "All right."

"He- he is in his room. You'll need to come quickly, Kimberly." My mother's maid... Perhaps, now, my all-consuming adoration for this beauty, the flame of my love that transcended the mere bonds of sisterhood, has dimmed to little more than a feeble flicker of awareness.

"Have you seen him?"

"He- he isn't well." Again, she affirms this.

"What do you mean? Is it..." Is it his heart? Has he contracted some dreadful disease? Is he, my mind bitterly yearns to demand, simply exhausted from a lover that is his daughter's age?

"I do not know! I am not a physician!" Valentina again raves, delicate tones soaring to a brittle and vertiginous peak that crackles with a dissonant and uncharacteristic screech through the hollow and sullen darkness of the children's quarters. Fine, seething tendrils of electric blue lightning creep through blackness lit merely by the pale and sorrowful glare of lamps that blaze with a perpetual vermillion; the rich warmth of wood magnifies it virtually to a sanguine boil, swimming around us in eddies and pools that promiscuously dance with and part from eerie ribbons of shadow.

"I- I understand." Xi Go has remained silent beside me, perhaps stunned into muteness by the almost unaccountable apathy that we have confronted from Valentina. "I... I merely worry for him." Is that a lie? Could that actually be the truth? Does it occupy an uncomfortable and dusky median, perhaps slouching inexorably toward untruth, even as a tiny shard of my soul strives to scream its devotion above the crushing shadow of reality?

"Maria says that you are needed to minister to him."

"W-why would that be?"

"I do not know, Kimberly." Another exasperated sigh, perhaps now honed to practiced perfection. "I do not know."

"H-have you met _Shego_, Valentina? I know that Maria has, but-"

"I do not know what is wrong with your father, Kimberly. Please, come quickly." And I am jarred into silence by a mechanical and thoughtless reply, as if from a living dictaphone.

"But, I..." The tension rippling through Xi Go's hand, suddenly shivering with a crushing power barely in abeyance, strangles those words within my throat.

"She has met me, Kimberly." My love offers, again with that infuriating crypticness, albeit wavering with a truly palpable unease. "Valentina is very lovely."

"O-oh." The rain has begun to intensify, we discover, as the yawning, beauteously-graven gate ushers us into the courtyard, ancient stone becoming a blackening river that sluices inexorably into the depths of a garden suddenly and bewilderingly silent with a shivering sense of anxiety. It is as if life has stilled amidst a storm that seems to seep through the very fabric of reality itself, transcending even the bounds of the tangible and corporeal; even the spirits that rage and dance through its ebon infinity have stilled, no longer calling out in yammering babels of silence colored with their exotic and luminous tones.

Thunder has become an unremitting percussion, a sickly and dreadful azure fire transforming this murk into radiant daylight announcing the arrival of another hammering timpani roar that raises a shivering sense of dread through me; my heart seems to beat in furious, relentless counterpoint to it, as if every pulse has deliberately sought to flee from the howling snarl of a truly malign beast.

"_S-Shego_, this storm... Is- is this natural?"

"What do you mean?" Even my love seems troubled, despite the apparent levity of such a reply.

"It- it feels strange; peculiar, as if something is..."

"The dragons are afraid. This is not heaven's own design." And I feel as if I will faint with such a revelation.

"You cannot beseech them to end this?"

"They would not listen; there are terrible spirits raging and rioting around us, and even they are terrified. The garden is frightened."

"Is..."

"We are not to blame." My love assures me, even as a sense of truly palpable madness swells around us in a shimmering and confused mist. An imperceptible shields seems to sap the damp substance from those rattling droplets; merely the subtlest whisper of a chill announces the passage of those formless beads, those dragon's tears that raise shivering prickles across my skin.

"W-what do you mean? Who is, then?"

"Someone, or something, unnatural; not an immortal. I... I had feared that it may have been _Lan se long_, that our ordeal this evening may have lured him to this city, but this is not a force in equilibrium with the Tao, however cold and selfish; this is something opposed, something dreadful and awful and howling with a madness that defies heaven's own order."

"W-would the Jade Emperor-"

"This is not his purview."

"What do you mean?"

"This is of the world of men, but not natural."

"I do not understand."

"I don't, either, Kimberly." A sincere and unveiled admission of her ignorance, which seems at once to knot those shivering fibers of dread and doubt and fear into a single, throbbing knot within the pit of my stomach. "We should see to your father, however."

"Are you not afraid?"

"I do not know." And silence again settles upon us, resounding in rippling and miserable, sinister waves through the great hall through which we are led as if a funeral procession; oddly unhurried, footfalls seeming to pound with the great and abominable beat of unnatural thunder. I realize that I have never visited my parents within their chambers; we are guided through a familiar corridor, shrouded by a great awning of the sort that had sheltered us from the most furious of the storm's wrath, and that has remained for some time. Rather than the European room, however, we are forced forward; the rippling scales of the great dragon's powerful body of serpentine stone seem to shiver with a barely subdued fear at the liquid malice that drowns out the moon and shatters the natural darkness of the sky with its savage, spearing streaks of azure.

"I am afraid, _Shego_." That admission is without shame; merely a subtle prickle of guilt at the notion of the strength that I wish to rage with a ferocious and unyielding enormity tarnished by such a surrender to what is indeed the monstrous presence of what seems pure evil.

"I know, My Kimberly; but, all will be well."

"I love you." It is as if Valentina's very presence is but a phantasmagoria of flesh; invisible and thoughtless and unperceiving, even as she guides us toward my father.

"I love you, Kimberly. All will be fine." She repeats again, as if desperate to affirm her own convictions. "It will be all right."

"I know." Ultimately, it will be. Regardless of the howling evil of that storm that now has begun to adopt seemingly tangible form of its own, a pernicious and awful specter that stalks these rustic and glorious corridors in shivering, rippling shades of ebon and azure, the love that wreathes us can ward off any violence, any such awful bestiality. "I believe you, _Shego_."

"And I believe you, my Love." That raises a further swell of courage into my very soul, and my spirit riots and rages above this cruel tempest.

We stand before a door much like our own, I discover at once; the adults' wing is essentially identical to the children's, save for the vicissitudes of decoration and adornment; even the walls seem transplanted from those beauteous chambers, writhing with a molten crimson splendor that nevertheless inspires a fierce and tortured shiver through me.

"I- is this my father's chamber, Valentina?"

"Yes." And, yet, she does not part the door; standing beside it as if a mere sentinel, I confront an unfocused bovine stare from her, not even the subtlest gesture urging me into the room.

"W-will you open the door, Valentina?" A suggestion that does not seemingly meet with the utmost appreciation, her expressionless features briefly contorting into a mildly cross frown.

"I would never be so presumptuous."

"V-very well, then. This is his room, isn't it?" I cannot even begin to conceive of confronting my mother and father within the span of a single evening.

"Yes, Kimberly. They are expecting you." A leaden tone of utter ominousness that invokes a yearning to revolt, to simply flee.

"I... Very well." And, as my hand falls upon a knob that is at once as familiar as my lover's eyes and as foreign as the dark side of the moon, I must again struggle with a chilling and frightful welter of dread that menaces that soaring strength with an ignominious plunge into awful, black waters.

Its advance is a tortured, silent arc that seems to throb throughout eternity itself; and, even as it has parted, the image that lurks upon my mind, that desperately struggles to preserve its purchase, is of that door; again and again, within a second that unfolds into infinity, a yearning never to have opened it, never to have confronted the nightmare image that follows, rages through my soul. Even Xi Go is unprepared for this monstrous spectacle, a low and horrified gasp resounding through senses suddenly hollow and graying with a lapsing definition, as if overcome with an unfathomable faintness.

My eyes do not quite grasp the writhing madness of what I witness, as if beholding some indulgently bizarre work of the _avant-garde_; improbable geometries that are fundamentally irreconcilable with the proper reality that my vision craves, upon which my very sense of truth rests. My lips cannot form coherent words, even a scream that lies strangled within the depths of my throat; even as I yearn to rage and howl, to screech and shriek at the nightmare that confronts me.

"I brought them, Maria." Valentina's voice is of implausible, level staidness, as if utterly comfortable with the impossible horror that snakes in gruesome, lurid streaks through my sight.

"W-what? Valentina, what are you-" My father's voice, upraised in sudden bewilderment at our announced arrival; it is as if his words filter through some horrid, gauzy mist, virtually opaque, as I reel, struggling for breath.

"Don't stop, now, sir." And Maria; she is as if death, rouged lips, bruised with fierce and frantic kisses, parted in a hideous slash of a grin that seems as though a weeping wound upon beautiful, flushed features. She rests atop him, unashamed in her nudity; gleaming with a slick and lustrous veneer of sweat, I finally behold a sight that has haunted my unwitting dreams until this sublime union with Xi Go. "You don't need to stop."

"M-Maria, what are you-" Another weak and witless protest from a fallen giant, powerful, gnarled hands continuing to cling to the sleek and lovely taper of Maria's slim waist.

"If you're not willing to keep going, then I will." And she shifts into sudden and manic motion; rising and falling, full and weighty breasts swaying with a pendulous immensity, her fine and slim fingers clawing at a broad, darkly-furred chest. "T-that feels... That's so amazing, sir. Dmitri!" Those words, those vile and dreadful words that swell forth in monstrous, savage pants, her cheeks reddening with some abominable and hideous parody of rapture that streams through her in tense currents, are spoken to me; her deep, featureless eyes never quit my own.

"K-keep fucking me, Dmitri. C-come on." A vulgar, whimpering encouragement. She speaks my father's name as my mother should, even joined with words that no proper lady would dare utter.

"Maria, what are you doing? Y-you need to stop!" Enormous arms, impossibly, cannot arrest her fine and feminine body.

"Why, Dmitri? Because your daughter can see us like this? Because her sexy little governess can see you inside of me? Isn't- isn't that where you belong, Dmitri? Isn't that where you wanted to be? Or- or is it that you want Valentina with us, too, like you love so much?"

"Maria, please-"

"No! I'm... God, I'm going to come again, Dmitri. Are you going to come inside of me, like always?"

With that, I can no longer remain silent; even with this unfathomable disgust worming through my very body as if through diseased and necrotic soil; even as my stomach is convulsed with a horrid and savage tension; even as I wish to faint away, to flee this misery as though from a hellish nightmare, I know that I must speak, that I must confirm this anguish with my own voice as I rage against it.

"Stop this! Maria, stop this at once!"

"You finally speak, Princess." Spat with a liquid malignancy, a savage venom that sees her halt at once. "You finally speak. Did... Did you like seeing me come atop papa," my god, the vile relish with which she speaks that word, "Kimberly? _Kim_? Did you? Did you like seeing that?"

"W-what are you doing?" A command with a tortured and quivering wretch of a voice.

"What he asks of me, Kimberly." Maria's cheeks remain flushed, dusky and glimmering with a vulgar and hideous sheen of some sickly passion amid the lurid scarlet play of lamplight, a torrid and nauseating, cloying atmosphere of sweat, a feminine sweetness, and the noxious odor that streamed in malign torrents from Du. "What he wanted so badly that he couldn't resist; just like with Valentina. But, he wanted me first."

"Maria, please, don't-" Another feeble and pitiful protest from my father is silenced.

"Don't be silly, Dmitri. We're lovers, aren't we? Shouldn't you be proud? Don't you love taking me, as you did that first time? This young and sweet skin; this pure and untouched body, only for you?" And, yet, she continues to speak solely to me. "I didn't want it the first time. I... I can't believe how much I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, but he made me silent with those soft lips of his. Has he ever kissed you, Kimberly? I always wondered about that.

"If he took you, too, like he fantasizes about- just like Annette when she was so young. He'd never tell me so forthrightly, but he gets so big and hard when I talk about that- both of us fucking you, especially if I were to hold you down." I wish to scream at those monstrous words, those evil and hateful words of grinning devilry.

"P-please, Maria, don't-"

"You're so silly, Dmitri; you act like your daughter's a saint..." Don't you dare, Maria! "When she's only a little slut, Dmitri; a sodomite, frolicking with her beautiful governess like a pair of sinful little creatures. Just like us."

"Shut up, Maria!" Finally, I can scream again; again and again and again as those monstrous words roll over us. "Shut up! Shut your mouth! Shut your mouth! Shut your fucking mouth!" Never have I spoken such awful words; never have I even pondered them, but I cannot restrain myself.

"Shut my mouth, little _Kim_? Shut my mouth? Maybe you should have come a bit earlier, when something else was there."

"H-how could you-"

"How could I, _Kim_?" Her voice has risen to a scream; and still, Valentina is beside us, silent and inexpressive. "How could I be held down and told what is best for me, what is so good and wonderful? How could I be begging for you to help, and be ignored by even my own sister, by a girl that I felt was my sister? How could I?

"You're so worthless, _Kim_; you couldn't even save your little friend, could you?"

"W-what are you talking about?" That chills me as if a lance of ice, shearing through my body. Xi Go is still beside me, as well, as if unable to even imagine what she should do; our emotions pool together into a single joined ocean of horror and disgust.

"What am I talking about? Oh, imagine how disappointed this great man and I were to find that your sweet little patrician friend was gone this evening." No. "Oh, yes, _Kim_. Ariadne is so beautiful, isn't she? And so sweet. I wonder if you ever found out what she tastes like; she always moans your name, even when she thinks I can't hear her, when she thinks Dmitri can't."

"No..." A low, anguished moan of refusal, of utter denial, that I only belatedly realize has spilled from my lips.

"Yes." And it unfurls from her at once, without preamble, at that savage and bestial affirmation; liquid azure flame, as if the fiery essence of that lightning, curling around her as if the arms of a nightmare, supernatural lover. Her eyes alight with it; her fingers crackle with it; it is evil, wicked and unrepentant and savage. It is evil. "Yes, Kimberly. Even if she'd already been loosened up, she was lovely; patrician girls, I think, are the best, because there's still a stiff pride, still a resistance to being degraded. To being fucked, Kimberly. Will you be like that? Will both you and your beautiful governess?"

"M-Maria, p-please, don't-"

"Shut up, Dmitri." No longer that sickeningly gentle and playful parody of a wife's affections; slim talons seem to ease from her slender fingers, lancing shallowly into my father's pale and waxen chest with a hideous squelching of flesh. "Shut your mouth. You don't have any place to beg anything of me; not after what you did to me. Not after you showed me how wonderful this is." And, horrifically, she weeps azure tears; through her smile, her dreadful and vile, grinning words, some unfathomable anguish floods forth.

"I always wanted you, Kimberly; I don't know if it was because I'm a sodomite like you, or if I just wanted to be as close as I could." A hitching, tormented moment of clarity; in that flickering instant, that terrible blue fire seems to lose luster and definition, before raging again to the surface. "But, that doesn't matter. Take hold of them, Valentina."

"Stay away from her." Valentina's full and womanly body yields a pitiful and brittle thump upon the stout wooden floor, hurled into the depths of unconsciousness by my love's powerful hands; and, yet, I confront not the slightest flicker of grief or disappointment from Maria as I turn again to her. She has risen from my father; a terrible crimson length swells from him, and yet he cannot, or will not, conceal his nudity; from her flows a dreadful stream of what I cannot even bear to imagine.

"He came inside of me, _Kim_; but that's all right. I've been with his child for a month, now, or maybe more; it was probably that first time. I once heard from one of the maids that your first time is when you're almost guaranteed to be."

"Please, Maria, don't do this." I beg; even with the hideous brutality that she has inflicted upon me, even with her taunting cruelties, I plead as if I am her servant. The thought of her approaching in this soiled, smoldering evil is unbearable; a further step is the waking fruition of hell's own design. "Please."

"I wanted you, Kimberly. Please." And she begs, as well, with an exaggerated, almost childish, femininity; enormous lashes flicker across sweat-stained cheeks, a gentle and coquettish cock of her head sending the full immensity of her chestnut mane, no longer bound within its braid, across her skin. "Please. In... In the bath, I always loved touching you; I know that you loved it when I would touch you. I could feel it."

"Maria-"

"Please!" And, yet, that monstrous flame rises and rises; as if fed with every breath that wrenches itself from my lungs, every swell of my chest another pump of demonic bellows. "I wanted... When I screamed at you, when I hit you, what I wanted so badly was to touch you. I- I wanted you to feel this."

"Maria, I-"

"You are not sorry!" And the tenderness, the flirtatious and pining, weighty sexuality vanishes; that flame arcs from an outstretched hand, becoming truly tangible, flaring through this simmering, turbid darkness toward my breast. Fleeing it parts me from Xi Go; between us swells that terrible azure heat, reaching toward the heavens, blazing through the roof. It is inextinguishable; the savage torrent of rain that courses from above cannot even begin to quench it.

"You are not sorry! You care nothing for me! You left me! You left me, Kimberly!"

"Maria, I am sorry." She is strengthened by her hate; as my love for Xi Go has empowered me, Maria's hatred, dancing and screaming and grinning and weeping, has begun to coil through her slender body, rippling and springing in furious, lunging strikes.

"You are not sorry! Y-you are happy with that woman, and you think nothing of me!" Maria is no longer human; even as that beautiful form confronts me, I know that something monstrous lies within her. She is that terrible, shining blue fire, and she vaults and lunges, fists sheathed in an impossible flame shearing through reality itself.

"I love you, Maria!" I do; I love Maria; I love the sweet, and tender, and achingly, radiantly loving maid that once cared for me, that I adored, that was my sister.

"I hate you!" It blazes upon my skin; as though I have strayed near to the roiling inferno of our family's vast hearth, the merest caress of that monstrous flame is screaming anguish. "I hate you! I will hurt you! I will crush you!"

"Please, do not!" Please, do not force me to hurt you, Maria. Please, do... Do not allow that awful gray definition to erupt; do not permit these tears to transform into that hellish mist of battle. "_Shego_, please! Please!" Do not let us be sundered by this terrible blue flame.

"She will not save you, Kimberly! I will make you feel more pain than you can imagine! I will make you feel what I have! I will save you with my hate!" And she laughs; as she bawls, sobbing, stout droplets of water streaming through a ceiling reduced to ash, that fierce, icy spring rain joining with her tears, she laughs.

"_Shego_, please!"

"Scream, Kimberly! Scream!" And I feel near to collapse; Maria is so swift, energized by her hate, even as I feel as if those seething sheets of liquid azure have separated me from my love. "I want to hear you scream. I want to laugh; I want to smile while you serenade me."

"No..." Why? Why, now, has this stricken me? The jade that rattles upon its chain has no partner; it falls silent upon my chest, and I am certain that my heart will be stilled by Maria's next blow.

"No!" Springing from those flames, that untraversable ocean of hate, is my love; is her scream, rising above Maria's fulminating evil. A solid blow deflects Maria, and yet she merely wheels around, rocketing forth with a renewed rage.

"You bitch! You whore! You are what led my Kimberly astray! You will be the one who will leave; I will free her from your grip! She will watch you die! She will scream while you die, governess." Now, even as my eyes goggle, even as I register this unfathomable evil with a screaming, lurching terror upon my lips, my soul is at peace.

"I'm sorry." Time has stilled, but not enough; there's never enough time. That thought almost raises a laugh from the bitterest depths of my soul as that fire pierces my body; as my own hands lash out, love with purpose, without the _Tao_'s immortal, neutral guidance, lances through Maria. She smiles as that cruel fire dies at once; as she perishes, as the prison that her body has become folds upon itself, her eyes briefly flicker with a relief of salvation; even as I tumble back into my love's arms, the storm that had fed upon her hate withers, the sky cleared as if by the word of the divine.

"N-no! No! No! No!" We fall to earth together; from that glorious height, soaring into those forbidden orchards, I am again tumbling, tumbling... Her screams resound around us, swelling into the heavens.

"I... _Shego_." Slim, lovely fingers intertwine with my own, jointly feeling my lifeblood pour forth in streams much like those serene rains atop my chest.

"Kimberly, you're all right. You're all right." Xi Go is beautiful; yes, she is beautiful. Even wracked with tears, even as they spill from her like rain before the pale moon; even as full lips quiver and contort, she is so beautiful.

"I'm sorry, _Shego_." I no longer need breath; I no longer have need for pain. I see only her; I breathe only her wondrous perfume; even with death's awful penumbra, that evil presence, lurking so near, my eyes can savor only her glory. "Just... So close, wasn't I?"

"You're all right."

"Please, _Shego_."

"W-what?" A jarring and guilty flicker of words.

"Don't." I command; words frail and weak, I nevertheless order her with a fury that thunders with the full ferocity of a warrior's soul. "Don't you dare."

"It's not-"

"It is worthwhile. P-please, _Shego_; just... Just, let me be selfish one more time. Please." I beg now; I can feel a jade brilliance beginning to trickle through me, torn from her own heart. "Please."

"I cannot." She sobs. I have failed, but I cannot bear to cry; still, I smile, radiant and vast and utterly ecstatic to be held by my beloved. "I cannot. Not again. Even- even if you were still to die, I could not bear another day-"

"But, you will." I vow for her; selfish, and cruel, and stubborn, my love is nevertheless only for her. "For, it will not be too long. I... I will not die this time."

"What?"

"I will pour everything I have into that immortal jade." Our hands are fastened upon its magnificence. Even as frail as my body is, that has survived without even the subtlest flaw.

"Kimberly-"

"Death is so close, _Shego_; my soul is already separated from my body." It is; I feel those bonds sundered, severed by a supernatural hatred that was filled with unspeakable pain. "Giving your life would only keep this body alive without my heart."

"Kimberly..." She whimpers; terribly, agonizingly, she whimpers and weeps as I feel as if only I should.

"It's all right." Perhaps it is finally my time to reassure her. "It is all right."

"You are so selfish. So damn selfish."

"I know."

"And you'll make me help you."

"Just like always?"

"Just like always." Raised to my feet in her embrace, our hearts clasped together, our lips meet. It is a prayer, but unlike any that we have ever said in these moments. Beneath the silver luster of the moon, amid a stillness that is not sunrise or sunset, but consumed by the radiant magnificence of her love, of that dark and mysterious beauty, we say a prayer.

There are no mudras, no words, no exhortations; there are no petitions, and no pleas to the Jade Emperor, or to anything but our joined souls. Her tears fall like rain; mine pool with hers; our love unites.

"I love you."

"I love you."

Our voices, our souls, are indivisible. And, as Death, as that raven awfulness, howls and gnashes its terrible grin that has become a silent, snarling scream, I leave this place.

"I love you." And my eyes open again. She greets me with emerald eyes awash in tears, weeping and sobbing, her hands plunging into flesh that screams with a wailing anguish; my chest is ablaze; my head thunders as if I have set it beneath a smith's hammer.

"Kimberly! Kim! Kim! Kim!" And still she screams, and I wonder for a moment why I love that despised diminutive so terribly, until I realize that it does not matter. My love again caresses my name; even as this body feels so unfamiliar, clasped in an alien skin, I know that I am alive, and with her again.

"_Shego_. Shego." Which is right? Which is true? Does it matter?

"You're alive!" As if it is a miracle to awaken from sleep.

"Yes."

"I... I was so afraid that you'd left me again, Kimberly."

"Never."

"You've come back to me."

"I never left."

"No. Never." And she bears me into her arms, raising me from this plane. Overcome by a sense of the most exquisite liberation, even amidst an unfamiliar, swimming darkness, this old and rotten wood perfumed gloriously with her essence and the emerald beauty that floods between us, that sweeps around us, I weep. It is higher than I have ever been with her.

Our hearts and souls are as one. A chain lies broken at our feet, and, at last, we are together. Two pieces of jade resounding as one, beautiful and fine, into eternity.


	17. Afterword

Afterword:

A great many are owed an ample abundance of gratitude from the author.

Above all else, I would wish to affirm my undying adoration to my muse, to whom my work, as always, is devoted. Without her presence, her love, and her understanding, there would simply exist no cause to bother with such expression; words and life alike would be meaningless.

Of tremendous significance, naturally, while they remain anonymous at their request, is the patron who so generously sponsored this work, simply for their affection for my writing. It is my most fervent hope that _Ling Long_ exceeded even their lofty and gratifying expectations.

Obviously, I would not be so remiss to as to neglect the reviewers who so generously devoted their time to expressing their fondness for, and impressions of, _Ling Long_, as well as various other works upon the site. I fear that I have been wayward in offering responses to their commentary, but it is often a bit challenging to capture one's gratitude in a manner that does not seem formulaic.

Everyone who has read _Ling Long_, with adoration or otherwise, is also appreciated; while you may remain anonymous to me, there is nevertheless an undeniable delight in glimpsing the vast constellation of nations whose residents have settled upon my tale.

I would also wish to offer a reply to one anonymous reviewer whom I was unable to contact otherwise, courtesy of a lack of information: my command of Chinese is not even approaching fluent, and, while Han Yu Pinyin (or Pin Yin, I suppose) is the most desirable for terms within the realm of Mandarin, it is slightly more challenging to transliterate words unique to the _Wu_ dialect. Xi Go's pronunciation of 'Kuae Tsy' is intended to reflect her rural origins; it probably also represents how dubious my approach to such transliteration is.

And, a final notice from the author: fictional work is available for commission, with payment via PayPal or other electronic means. Interested parties are encouraged to contact the author via E-mail or private message for rates and terms. _Ling Long_ was developed as a donor project at the aforementioned anonymous patron's request, and should be considered characteristic of the quality of work to be expected.


End file.
